Bing WMT — the underdog in SEO
Do not underestimate their power!
Bing Webmaster Tools are one of the most underrated SEO tools, especially if you work with large enterprise websites. Here are some examples why you would want to add it to your tool set, eg. for monitoring and QA.
1️ Easy notification management
Within just 1–2 clicks from anywhere in their dashboard, you can set which emails you want to receive. Do you want to receive any communication at all? You can even choose which ones, eg. only crawl errors. If you have ever managed a lot of websites and received Google’s monthly “Your month in Search” updates all at once, you know the pain.
2 URL tree view
Neat overview of URL structure and filter options for crawl and indexing issues — reminding you of the tree view of your favourite crawler — enabling you to see crawl and indexing stats at a glance for any filter. Practical!
They also have an API. At the time of writing this, our favourite SEO tool Screaming Frog have not yet enabled to use Bing Webmaster Tools API to add their data to our crawls but there is hope!
3 Flexible crawl control
You can choose a time zone and even the times in the day when BingBot should crawl your site more slowly. Might not be necessary for many of you but if it ever was — they make it easy, granular, and visual!
4 Great documentation: crawl error notification
Neat overview of error types and explanations. You can use this to filter notification emails by error code and only pull those most interesting to you into your #monitoring folder or channel for #seo #qa!
Last year, I explained to you how you can use free tools to pull & push specific notification emails from Google Search Console into a dedicated notification channel. With the list above, you can apply this to Bing, too!
5 Backlinks report with competitive insights
Bing Webmaster Tools’ backlinks section offers you to add similar sites to compare backlinks and anchor texts. Oh, the things you can do with that! If you click to add a site, Bing makes some suggestions for you. (Yes, it does work for sites you do not own, too!)
6 Keyword research with question filters
Bing WMT’s Keyword Research feature lets you automatically filter by question keywords or newly discovered terms related to your target query, incl. your impressions — and receive an overview of ranking websites (yes, also competitors) and the topic cluster Bing identified! In Google Search Console, you’ll have to learn how to use regular expressions to filter for question queries, and while it is not too hard to learn — this feature makes Bing the more accessible tool, especially for beginners.
7 URL inspection
If you inspect any URL, what you see is similar to Google Search Console but the report is enriched with addtional data such as missing alt attributes for images. I’d suggest you use other tools for that kind of monitoring at scale but it can come in handy, esp when you’re on a budget, as this is free!
DYK they are set up within one minute?
Like, literally: If you already have verified your site in Google Search Console, you can simply hook it up to Bing Webmaster Tools and are all set! It really is that easy.
Remember: Bing are not Google
Bing do however not show you how your site is performing on Google or other search engines obviously but can be a very helpful addition to your tool set. Discover more interesting keywords, use it for site health monitoring, etc. UXwise they do what SEOs love — tables!
