Increasing Your Site Traffic by 45% with Bing Webmaster Tools

I know, I know…when it comes to online searches, it is no secret that Google dominates. In fact, recent reports indicate that Google owns 66% of online search. For that reason, much of your search engine optimization should be geared towards your site making more of a splash on Google. However, a common mistake many people make is not taking into consideration how their page ranks on other possible search engines.

By now, hopefully you’re familiar with Google Webmaster Tools and and how to use this service to ensure your site visible through Google. If not, then this is certainly something you need to do so your search engine optimization efforts can actually bring you the results you want.

Bing – Not Even On Your Radar?

Apart from Google Webmaster Tools, you should familiarize yourself with Bing Webmaster Tools. This is how you can ensure your site will be found on Yahoo and Bing for searches. Google may be responsible for two-thirds of the search engine market, but there’s still 33% you could be missing out on if you focus only on Google. And yes, Yahoo and Bing are in cahoots, so by ensuring Microsoft Webmaster Tools can see your site, you’ll be figuratively killing two birds with one stone.

The alliance between Yahoo and Microsoft for trying to take back some search engine optimization power online, including through use of methods like Bing, has been somewhat effective. When you plan your inbound marketing campaign it is crucial that you also use Microsoft Webmaster Tools so you can get results from all over.

While focusing on Google is crucial, it can be a big mistake to overlook other avenues to take. In fact, because so many people focus their efforts on Google it makes it close to impossible to get the search engine optimization results they wanted. Diversify and you may improve your results with Microsoft’s Bing or Yahoo.

A quick to check to see if this is worth your while is to review your site analytics data. If Google represents 99% of your search traffic, then you should probably start researching why you’re not getting a representative proportion of traffic. Ensuring Bing & Yahoo is seeing your site could give you a 45% increase in traffic.

What to Expect

Take a tour of the Bing Webmaster Tools site and see what you can actually accomplish with your inbound marketing efforts. You will also find a way to try search advertising for Bing and Yahoo from here. Of course in the long run having organic results from your search engine optimization is going to work better for you than relying on just paid advertising.

The tools you will find here help you to see your site the way that Bing sees it. At the very least, you’ll want to claim your site and make sure that Bing has knows where your sitemap.xml is located.

Sometimes just using this for traffic stats gives you a great deal of insight to how your site is doing for inbound marketing. You can also share site information and check on who is linking to you. Both of these are important things to know about but you may not be able to find it through other methods of research. Of course, the most important tool on Bing Webmaster Tools is finding out how to optimize for search. The bottom line is that to make your search engine optimization efforts work, you should be using both Google and Bing Webmaster Tools.