Bing Webmaster Tools
What are the Bing Webmaster Tools?
Bing Webmaster Tools (Bing Webmaster Center) is a free service as part of Microsoft’s Bing search engine which allows webmasters to add their websites to the Bing index crawler, see how their website is performing on Bing (keywords, impressions, clicks, CTR and average position). The service also offers tools for webmasters to troubleshoot the crawling and indexing of their website.
Most digital marketers are familiar with Google eqyivalent – the famous google search console. Google product provides global webmasters with more comprehensive search performance data. There is no option to segment search queries by country with Bing. Bings historical data is also limited: A mere 6 months historical data is available as opposed to the 16 months available with Google. This means that Bing Webmaster Tools don’t allow any year over year comparison – unless you manually export and compare the data.
However, there are also a few tools that are available for Bing but not for Google:
- Competitive data in Backlink Report: This report allows you to compare your website’s backlink data against your competition. Obvisouly most digital marketers rely on SEO-tools like ahrefs, semrush or searchmetrics to spy on your competitors links. However, since it is real data from a search engine, one could at least use it as a completment to other tools.
- Session Replays: Many might use Hotjar or similar tools to watch session replays of real users. Hoever, for those with a limited budget this integration with Microsoft Clarity might come in handy. And it it free.
- Site Scan: Another free alternative to paid solutions like Screamingfrog or the Site Audit functionalities of semrush.
In which countries is Bing relevant?
- In Japan Bing and and Yahoo! account for combined for 23.3 %.
- In China Bing is currently the second most popular search engine (October 2022) with over 15 percent market share. Ccompared to Google’s 3.7% and behind local giant Baidu’s nearly 60 %.
- In the US Bing’s market share is around 7.4 % and fairly consistent over the years.
- In Germany Bing’s market share is around 6,5 % and fairly consistent over the years.
- In the UK Bing and and Yahoo! account for combined for 6.1 %.
