Why You Should Use Bing Webmaster Tools
Ever wondered how many clicks and impressions you’re getting from Bing Search? Bing Webmaster Tools is the solution that lets you see the performance you’re getting on Bing.
Without it, it will be hard to track the performance of your Bing SEO. And as a whole, as a free SEO tool, it provides data to help you troubleshoot SEO issues, especially for Bing Search.
Learn more about search engine optimization for a better context on how Bing Webmaster Tools benefit you the most.
As a web analytics tool, you can use the data to improve your website’s organic traffic visibility and generation for other search engines as well.
Learn more alternative search engines to seek growth online.
In this article, we are going to go through all the features of Bing Webmaster Tools that help you grow your websites organic traffic and measure the performance of Bing Search in your overall digital marketing strategy
What Is Bing Webmaster
Bing Webmaster is a free tool from Microsoft that allows website owners and managers to add their websites into the Bing index crawler to make sure their sites are available on Bing Search.
Through Bing Webmaster, you can see your performance you get from the Bing search engine and enables you to troubleshoot and manage your website’s presence on Bing Search.
For any updates and news for the tools, Bing publishes a blog to keep webmasters updated, a recommended read from time to time.
Before we get access to the tools and features, we need to sign up and set up Bing Webmasters.
How to Setup Websites For Bing Webmaster Tools
First, you will need an account. Start by signing up for Bing Webmaster Tools.
Then we can start submitting and verifying our URLs.
If you have your website already verified through Google Search Console, you can simply just import the settings, and you’re good to go.
For manual setup, you have three options to choose from:
- An XML File
- HTML Meta Tag
- Or Add CNAME record to DNS
The XML File Route
Download the file provided by Bing Webmaster and upload it to the root directory (public_html folder) of your site.
Then click verify.
HTML Meta Tag Route
Copy the <meta>-tag provided and paste it into home page <head> section before the <body>
And then click verify.
If you have a WordPress site, you could use tools such as Yoast or other SEO plugins to verify the connection easily.
For the plugin route, copy the id from the meta tag after Content=” YOURIDCODE” and paste it into the specified place on the tool themselves.
Or for Shopify, follow the guide on here.
The Adding CNAME Record Route
This method is probably the easiest and fastest of them all to do and execute as you don’t have to delve into your website specifics for verifying.
The easiness largely depends on your domain provider or hosting provider, but you will most likely get direct support from your provider to get this done.
You will need to have access to your domain and its DNS settings, which you can find from the place you bought the domain in the first place.
Once you’ve found DNS settings of the specific domain, add the CNAME record within DNS settings with the name provided by Bing.
Remember then to verify. And remember, changing DNS settings can take a while to complete.
Next, we’ll go through the main features that explain why we should use Bing Webmaster tools in the first place.
The Features of Bing Webmaster Tools
All the features of Bing Webmaster Tools:
- Track search performance on Bing
- Find keyword you rank in
- Upload sitemaps
- Submit URLs
- SEO Tools
- Discover Backlinks
- Keyword research
- SEO reports
- Site scans
- Control crawling and block URLs
- Test robot.txts
- Control copyright removal notices
- User management
- URL Inspections
Track Search Performance On Bing Search
Probably the primary feature website owners and marketers are looking for, is the ability to track Bing search performance.
You can quickly track the search performance with the tab of the same name.
In the search performance report, you will encounter four main metrics to follow:
- Total clicks
- Total impressions
- Average CTR
- Average Search Position
You can choose a time frame from seven days, 30 days, three months, six months, or any custom dates.
Below the section’s dashboard, you can filter search performance by keywords.
Through filtering, you can see the exact performance of any keyword or page—a helpful tool to see which keywords and pages are the most crucial for your organic Bing traffic.
Sitemaps And Submit URLs
In the Sitemaps -section, you will see:
- Known sitemaps (previously submitted)
- Any errors with current sitemaps
- Any possible warnings on current sitemaps
- And the total URLs discovered in said sitemaps.
You can also submit or resubmit the sitemaps of your websites by clicking “Submit sitemap” and enter the link of your sitemap.
The crucial thing here is to check when was the last time Bing crawled through your sitemap and if the crawl was successful.
You also want to make sure that the number of URLs discovered matches the number in your sitemaps. If it isn’t matching, you want to resubmit it again.
If the problems still exist, keep a note of the URLs missing as we can submit URLs directly into Bing’s crawlers.
To submit URLs directly, go the section “URL Submission” and by clicking submit URLs.
Webmasters can add 10,000 URLs per day for most sites, which means most websites can upload their newest URLs immediately for crawling, although having an updated sitemap will save you the most time.
There’s also a feature to make URL submissions via provided API from Bing programmatically.
And if you have a WordPress site, you can download Download Bing URL Submissions Plugin to have your newest URLs submitted automatically.
Use the URL inspection tool to verify if Bing currently indexes a specific page and URL.
Bing Webmaster SEO tools
For anyone improving their SEO performance to gain more organic traffic to their website, Bing Webmaster Tools offers a suite of SEO tools you can use to track performance and find optimization issues to fix later on.
The SEO tools available are:
- Backlinks
- Keyword research
- SEO Reports
- Site scan
Backlinks
With the Backlinks tool, you can see all the total referring domains, total referring pages, and the anchor texts. You can easily make out what domains link back to you, and what are the linking pages.
A nice feature within the backlinks is the similar site feature. You can use it to compare yourself against your competitors to see how your backlink profile matches your competitors.
Also, it gives you ideas on where to get more backlinks as websites linked to your competitor to have a higher chance of linking to your if you contact them and give them a reason to link back to you.
Keyword Research With Bing Webmaster Tools
You can use the Keyword Research Tool in Bing Webmaster Tools to discover new keywords and keyword combinations to use in your SEO strategy or ideas for content marketing.
You can filter keywords by country, language, device, and by a time range.
After searching for a keyword, you will see how many impressions said keyword got in the given time frame with a global breakdown of impressions per country.
Is keyword research with Bing useful? It depends. As it only gives impressions and not click amounts, it can be hard to define if a search term is click-worthy by the users.
But it can give you an idea of how much impressions it gets from Bing Search, which, if you’re actively optimizing for Bing, the keyword data is essential.
You should combine the findings from the keyword research tool with Keyword Planner from Google Ads and see the trend curves from Google trends to have a better idea of the significance of a single keyword on your website.
The tool also gives you related keywords for any query you just made, and for these, you can also see a trend curve with the impression said keyword got. The tool also shows you question keywords and newly discovered keywords for more SEO opportunities.
For any keyword you check with the tool, on the bottom, you will see the top 10 URLs for each keyword on Bing Search result pages itself and the broader topic associated with it.
A helpful tool for making sure you understand the level of competition of every keyword on Bing Search for each keyword. You will also realize what users most likely want to see for each keyword.
So for Bing SEO, the tool is essential. For general SEO, it’s nice to have as it’s free.
SEO Reports and Site Scans
The SEO reports tell you if your pages have any addressable SEO issues you need to fix. It’ll show you essential info on the errors and ranks them with a tag of high, moderate, or low severities.
For example, it can show you if one of your pages is missing an h1-tag.
It makes pinpointing errors a quick process, and as it tells you how to fix said issues. It’s beginner-friendly, and you will learn more during the process of fixing these problems.
You can also do a site scan of your whole website, sitemap, or URLs list.
The point of doing a regular site scan is to analyze your website’s common technical SEO issues that you can fix to improve performance on Bing.
The site scan emphasizes on ranking factors important to Bing, which makes the feature a crucial tool for Bing SEO as a whole.
Control Crawling, Block URLs, Robots.txt Tester
Under the configuration tab, you can control the way Bing crawls through your website.
For example, you can control when Bing crawls your website. You can set crawling time when you have the least expected traffic to your website, improving performance on those traffic peaks.
The Block URLs feature is quite self-explanatory as it let’s block specific URLs not to be indexed on Bing Search. Useful for controlling duplicate content, or unnecessary pages that you don’t want traffic to from Bing Search.
You can also test and edit your robot.txt files under the tools & enhancements-tab. In the same tab, you can verify an IP address associated with Bingbots.
Adding Users In Bing Webmaster Tools
You can have multiple users for each site’s Bing Webmaster accounts. The user type accounts can have different restrictions depending on your needs.
Users can be either:
- Administrators
- Read-Only
- Read-Write
Adding users is straightforward, click the Add User- button, give an email, role, and access scope, and a verification email will go to the users you added.
Conclusion
Including Bing Webmaster Tools in your tool kit for SEO or generally to track the performance of organic traffic from Bing, is an excellent addition as it’s also free.
As the first step to Bing SEO, making sure your website is crawled by Bing is crucial. But even if you’re not actively growing your presence on Bing, the suite of tools can have other benefits to your websites and business.
We hope you have a better understanding of all of the use cases and benefits of using Bing Webmaster Tools as a website owner or online marketer.