You may use Bing Webmaster Tools or you may not. For most New Zealand based businesses, Google Search has the majority market share by quite some margin, so it seems logical to focus efforts on Google Search and, on a local level, Google My Business.
Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Search Engine Market Share
However, for many of us in SEO, the clients we work with may be located in larger markets where we see similar local search engine market share, however, significantly larger population numbers mean less popular search engines may actually represent a lot of potential users to reach.
Similarly with New Zealand businesses that have international establishments.
For example, Bing has a 5.47% market share in the USA across all devices, and surprisingly, a 9.96% market share across Desktop devices and an unexpected 15.04% market share across Tablet devices. Google certainly owns the Mobile market share with a dominating 94.4%.
Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Search Engine Market Share
Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Search Engine Market Share
Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Search Engine Market Share
Getting familiar with what Bing has to offer is certainly worthwhile. Bing Webmaster Tools has some great SEO tools (including a handy keyword research tool) with some pretty useful reporting insights, and includes easy access to Microsoft Clarity, a very cool and (relatively) new user behavior analytics tool that helps you understand how users are interacting with your website through session replays and heatmaps – and its free.
Set your business up on Bing Places for Business, (much like Google My Business) another free and useful business service that Bing has to offer.
For webmasters, Bing has recently opened Content Submission API which, in addition to the URL submission API, now provides publishers and site owners the ability to notify Bing directly about URL along with content changes (send your HTML, content, images etc. directly to Bing to index, technically bypassing the crawling process).
Key takeaway
Bing may not be on your priority to-do list, but there’s a reasonable chance you may be missing out on genuine business opportunities. Remember, these tools and resources are FREE, with the only cost to you being a little time to get setup.
- Add Bing Webmaster Tools to your website by creating an account and verifying your site (same way Google Search Console works)
- Get setup on Bing Places for Business and verify your business address (by postcard)
- Check out Microsoft Clarity if you’re interested in user experience and conversion optimisation
- Chat with your web developer on whether adding the Content Submission API could benefit your (online) marketing objectives