Bing Webmaster Tools-The Complete Step-By-Step Guide

Bing is the second-most popular search engine after Google. But, most web owners don’t give much thought to it. Setting up the Bing webmaster tools can bring additional traffic to your website. 

As compared to Google, Bing draws a very small percentage of traffic. However, considering the current competition in online marketing, getting every bit of search engine traffic to your website makes sense. Using the Bing Webmaster tools, you can get your website indexed in the Bing search engine. Like how Google Search Console helps you monitor your website performance and ranking, Bing Webmaster Tools allow users to optimize your site for Bing.

What Does Bing Webmaster Tools Offer?

Bing accounts for 3.1% of the search engine traffic. While that’s a lot lesser than the traffic generated by Google, every bit counts when it comes to organic traffic. With the help of Bing webmaster tools, one can monitor their site’s health and overall performance. It also allows you to identify how people are finding their websites. Here’s what it offers:

• Check your website performance
• Identify the keywords your site is ranking for
• Getting Bing crawlers to crawl and index your web pages
• Delete pages that no longer exist 
• Fix spam issues

The tools give you insights into how Bing views your website. Based on these reports, you can change your content to improve your site’s ranking.

Tips for Setting up Bing Webmaster Tools

Create a Bing webmaster tools account. Visit the Bing WMT tools and create an account using your Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. As you sign up for an account with the tool, you will find a plain dashboard. Link your website to the tool. Add your URL to the blank field in the My Sites section and click on “add.” Once you enter your website link, you will be redirected to a page where you are asked to submit more information about your website.

First things first, you need to submit the sitemap. Once you fill out this information, scroll down the page and hit the save button. The next step is to complete the verification. 

Here’s how to verify your Bing webmaster tools profile.

• Using XML File Authentication: Import your XML file to your root directory using the FTP protocol.
• Put a custom meta tag on your Bing website homepage
• Collect the CNAME record from your hosting provider and update it on your Bing webmaster tools account

If these methods look tricky, Bing offers an option to import your Google-verified website directly to Bing webmaster tools. However, for that to work, you must have a verified website on Google.

Read Also:- A Complete Guide to Google Analytics 4 Setup

Bing Homepage

After adding a verified website to Bing, the plain dashboard will turn into your home. The home will give you detailed information about your site’s performance overall. Check out the Reports section to collect data about the clicks, impressions, CTR, and position. You can click on the features you want to track without viewing the entire report. The “SEO reports” section shows you the errors classified into severe, moderate, and low errors. 

The home has a “submit URL” section that enables people to enter the URL of their new pages. Bing webmaster tools have the same dashboard as Google Console’s home. 

View Reports

The best part about the tool is that it allows you to sort the data by 3 months, 6 months, one month, or custom. You can also filter the report by:

• Impressions
• Clicks
• Average position
• Average CTR

The tool also allows you to categorize data into keywords and pages. It has recently added a URL inspection feature to its search panel. This one helps you figure out crawling, indexing, and markup errors that need to be addressed for your website ranking. In the menu, click on “URL inspection” to get a real-time report on the SEO errors.

Bing has also added “Site Explorer,” a function that Google Console doesn’t offer currently. It gives you a glimpse of how Bing views your website. The report looks a bit complex initially, but as you dig deeper, you will be able to get a better view of the features. This option allows you to see the blocked pages, malware-infected pages, and other errors in your website.

Note that you have to manually submit each page to the Bing search engine. There is a submit URL section where you can enter the URL of the new landing pages, blog posts, homepage, and other static and informative pages. The bots will immediately crawl your pages, and if they meet the search engine’s criteria, your pages will show up in the Bing search engine. 

These were only to name a few. Check out the Bing webmaster tools now to get a clear picture of the Bing functions, SEO, URL inspection, and more.