Why Bing matters more than you think – especially for engineering and industrial companies

Bing is often neglected because its traffic is seen to be significantly lower than Google’s. This is true, but its not as true as you might think in certain industries.

Bing also gives very valuable data and insights that Google doesn’t.

We can gain deeper insight into our content and search performance by leveraging Bing.

Get set up with Bing Webmaster Tools
1. Microsoft Clarity
2. IndexNow
AI Visibility
Queries, Topics & Intent
Your customers use Bing – the Microsoft Tech Stack
Bing Index Feeds ChatGPT
Bing Ads – PPC at a discount
Differences in SEO for Bing vs Google
References & Resources

Get set up with Bing Webmaster Tools

Set up of Bing Webmaster Tools is something that is often forgotten about and takes second or third place to Google Search Console.

We always set up Bing Webmaster Tools with all new client accounts as it opens up viable data sources and gives useful marketing feedback.

Microsoft Clarity

The first benefit of setting up Bing Webmaster Tools is that it leads you to also set up Microsoft clarity which is an extremely powerful and free session tracking tool.

IndexNow

Another lesser known and utilized function is the IndexNow protocol. In setting up Bing Webmaster Tools you also get to set up IndexNow.

This does pretty much what it sounds like – allows you to get your pages indexed very quickly. Google doesn’t support this, but Bing and other platforms do.

You can unlock meaningful traffic just by enabling IndexNow and telling Bing about your pages.

AI Visibility

An area where Bing Excels compared to Google is the data you get on your AI Visibility.

Google tells you how many impressions you had.

Bing tells you which pages were cited and how many clicks you got plus a whole lot more.

Queries, Topics & Intent

Bing gives you a very detailed picture on the AI queries people use, the topics they are categorized into and the intent of those queries.

This is highly aligned to the PAIS content strategy we apply which helps you build content on the topics that your customers are asking questions on.

Your customers use Bing – the Microsoft Tech Stack

One big reason to pay more attention to Bing is that in certain industries like Engineering, Industrial, Aerospace and other tech sectors the predominant tech stack is Microsoft based.

This means the likely default search experience is powered by Bing not Google.

So those stats that show Google as all dominant fall away a bit. Google is still bigger but Bing is a much more important part of the mix.

This becomes even more apparent when you look at the demographics of Bing users and how they align more closely to the typical engineering and industrial customer.

Bing Index Feeds ChatGPT

Another good reason to ensure you have high Bing visibility and indexing is that it feeds into ChatGPTs results. Around 87% of ChatGPTs results feature a Bing top 10 ranking. Furthermore, with Bing you feed into the Microsoft Ecosystem with Windows search, copilot and ChatGPT.

Bing Ads – PPC at a discount

Many people run Google Ads and are disappointed with the results.

In industrial and engineering sectors the cost of Bing ads are about 25% of the costs of Google, the volume can be up to 25% of Google and the conversion rates are typically higher due to a closer audience and buyer intent.

This creates meaningfully better ROI on your PPC ads.

Couple that with a high converting B2B landing page and that’s a powerful combination.

Differences in SEO for Bing vs Google

While search engine optimization fundamentals are principles that can be more broadly applied there are some differences between Bing and Google.

Knowing these differences with Bing ranking signals and being able to leverage them can increase your Bing visibility without detriment to Google and can put you in front of your customers where they conduct their searches.

Keyword match

Bing prefers exact match in titles, headings and URLs more than Google. Google is great at understanding topical relationships such that your pages can be returned relatively well for terms they don’t explicitly mention, this is much less the case in Bing.

Mobile first

Google is fully mobile first where as Bing is device agnostic. Most B2B buyers in industrial and engineering sectors are desktop based. Many websites suffer technical challenges due to significant compromises to fully accommodate mobile device availability.

Backlinks

Google highly values quality whereas Bing tends to prefer volume and domain age.

JavaScript

Google has advanced rendering capabilities but can still struggle with heavy client side rendering and scripts that can break, however Bing has even more challenges with Google. It’s best to make sure you are serving fully rendered HTML with minimal JavaScript.

Technical Factors

Google uses code web vitals (CWV) as a ranking signal where is Bing looks at raw page speed and response times. Some sites and plugins are over optimized and degraded in real terms by heavy optimization for CWV.