I hope you’re all set up with Google Search Console, and use it regularly to check how your website is performing in search. We use the data from Search Console to email interesting weekly reports to our clients, showing how they’re performing for chosen search terms, and it’s a really useful exercise. Even if you don’t have time to investigate the data that often, Search Console can be useful to provide warnings about problems with your site.
What many people don’t know is that Microsoft’s Bing search engine has a similar system, called Bing Webmaster Tools. Now, Bing may only send a small fraction of the number of visitors to your site that Google does, but that’s still worth spending time on. We have a number of clients who spend hundreds of pounds a month on search advertising – quite effectively – and yet even so, the results are still only about the same volume as Bing natural search provides for free. Also, many of the recommendations and ideas you’ll get from Bing Webmaster Tools will be applicable to other search engines, including Google.
Bing Webmaster Tools looks a little crude compared to Google Search Console, but anyone familiar with the latter will recognise most of the data and reporting on offer. It’s well worth setting up, and adding to your regular site management checklist.
If you’re new to Bing Webmaster Tools, start here. Interestingly, Bing has announced that it’s increasing the emphasis it’s placing on manually submitted URLs. So although it will continue to crawl your site, just as Google does, it’s keen for you to list the pages you want it to crawl, and has increased the daily maximum you can submit from 10 to 10,000.