Everything You Can Do With Bing Webmaster Tools

Learn everything there is to know about using Bing Webmaster Tools to boost organic traffic. Use the Bing SEO tools or look at the performance you're getting from Bing.

Why Should You Use Bing Webmaster Tools?

Have you ever wondered how many Bing Search clicks and impressions you get? Bing Webmaster Tools is a solution that allows you to monitor your performance on Bing.

It will be difficult to track the performance of your Bing SEO without it. Overall, as a free SEO tool, it provides data to assist you in troubleshooting SEO issues, particularly for Bing Search.

Learn more about search engine optimization to better understand how Bing Webmaster Tools can help you.

You can use the data as a web analytics tool to improve your website's organic traffic visibility and generation for other search engines as well.

Learn more about alternative search engines for online growth.

In this article, we will go over all of the features of Bing Webmaster Tools that will assist you in increasing organic traffic to your website and measuring the performance of Bing Search in your overall digital marketing strategy.

What Exactly Is Bing Webmaster?

Bing Webmaster is a free Microsoft tool that allows website owners and managers to add their websites to the Bing index crawler, ensuring that their sites are searchable on Bing.

Bing Webmaster allows you to view your Bing search engine performance and troubleshoot and manage your website's presence on Bing Search.

Bing publishes a blog to keep webmasters up to date on any updates and news for the tools, which is a recommended read from time to time.

Before we can access the tools and features, we must first sign up for and configure Bing Webmasters.

Sign up for Bing Webmaster Tools

How to Configure a Website for Bing Webmaster Tools?

First, you'll need to create an account. Begin by registering for Bing Webmaster Tools. After that, we can begin submitting and verifying our URLs.

If your website has already been verified through Google Search Console, you can simply import the settings and you're ready to go.

You have three options for manual configuration:

An XML Document

Meta Tag in HTML

Alternatively, add a CNAME record to DNS.

The XML File Path

Download the file provided by Bing Webmaster and place it in your site's root directory (public HTML folder).

Then click the verify button.

HTML Meta Tag Path

Copy the provided meta>-tag and paste it into the home page's head> section before the body>.

Then click the verify button.

If you have a WordPress site, you can easily verify the connection using tools like Yoast or other SEO plugins.

For the plugin route, copy the id from the meta tag after Content=" YOURIDCODE" and paste it into the tool's specified location.

Alternatively, for Shopify, see this guide.

Route for Adding CNAME Records

Because you don't have to delve into your website's specifics for verification, this method is probably the simplest and quickest of them all to do and execute.

The ease of use is largely dependent on your domain or hosting provider, but you will almost certainly receive direct support from your provider to get this done.

You will need access to your domain and its DNS settings, which you can obtain from the location where you purchased the domain in the first place.

Once you've located the DNS settings for the specific domain, add the CNAME record with the name provided by Bing to the DNS settings.

Remember to double-check. Also, keep in mind that changing DNS settings can take some time.

Following that, we'll go over the main features that explain why we should use Bing Webmaster tools in the first place.

Features of Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing Webmaster Tools has the following features:

Bing search performance can be tracked.

Find the keyword in which you rank.

Sitemaps should be uploaded.

URLs should be submitted.

SEO Instruments

Find Out About Backlinks

Keyword investigation

SEO evaluations

Site inspections

Control crawling and URL blocking

robot.txts is a test file.

Copyright removal notices must be controlled.

User administration

URL Examining

Monitor Your Search Performance on Bing Search

The ability to track Bing search performance is probably the most important feature that website owners and marketers are looking for.

With the tab of the same name, you can quickly track the search performance.

In the search performance report, you will find four key metrics to monitor:

Total number of clicks

Overall impressions

CTR on average

Average Position in Search

You have the option of selecting a time frame of seven days, 30 days, three months, six months, or any custom dates.

You can filter search performance by keywords below the section's dashboard.

Filtering allows you to see the exact performance of any keyword or page—a useful tool for determining which keywords and pages are most important for your organic Bing traffic.

Sitemaps and URL Submission

You will find the following items in the Sitemaps -section:

Sitemaps that are well-known (previously submitted)

Any issues with the current sitemaps?

Any potential issues with the current sitemaps?

In addition, the total number of URLs discovered in said sitemaps.

You can also submit or resubmit your website's sitemaps by clicking "Submit sitemap" and entering the link to your sitemap.

The most important thing to look for here is when Bing last crawled your sitemap and whether or not the crawl was successful.

You should also double-check that the number of URLs discovered matches the number in your sitemaps. If it doesn't match, you should resubmit it.

If the issues persist, make a note of the URLs that are missing so that we can submit them directly to Bing's crawlers.

To submit URLs directly, go to the "URL Submission" section and click submit URLs.

For most sites, webmasters can add 10,000 URLs per day, which means that most websites can immediately upload their newest URLs for crawling, though having an updated sitemap will save you the most time.

Bing Webmaster Tools URL Submission

There is also a feature that allows you to make URL submissions programmatically using the Bing API.

Additionally, if you have a WordPress site, you can download the Download Bing URL Submissions Plugin to have your most recent URLs submitted automatically.

To see if Bing currently indexes a specific page and URL, use the URL inspection tool.

URL Inspection in Bing Webmaster Tools

SEO tools for Bing Webmaster

Bing Webmaster Tools provides a suite of SEO tools to track performance and identify optimization issues to fix later on for anyone looking to improve their SEO performance to gain more organic traffic to their website.

The following SEO tools are available:

Backlinks

Keyword investigation

Reports on SEO

Scan the site

Backlinks

The Backlinks tool displays the total referring domains, total referring pages, and anchor texts. You can easily determine which domains link back to you and which pages link to you.

A similar site feature is a useful feature within the backlinks. You can use it to compare yourself to your competitors to see how your backlink profile compares.

It also gives you ideas on where to get more backlinks because websites linked to your competitor are more likely to link to you if you contact them and give them a reason to link back to you.

Bing Webmaster Tools for Keyword Research

The Keyword Research Tool in Bing Webmaster Tools can help you find new keywords and keyword combinations to use in your SEO strategy or content marketing ideas.

Bing Keyword Research

Keywords can be filtered by country, language, device, and time range.

After searching for a keyword, you will see how many impressions that keyword received in the specified time frame, as well as a global breakdown of impressions by country.

Global Keyword Analysis in Bing

Is Bing keyword research useful? It is conditional. Because it only provides impressions and not click amounts, it can be difficult to determine whether a search term is click-worthy by users.

However, it can give you an idea of how many impressions it receives from Bing Search, which is important if you're actively optimizing for Bing.

To get a better idea of the importance of a single keyword on your website, combine the findings from the keyword research tool with Keyword Planner from Google Ads and look at the trend curves from Google Trends.

The tool also suggests related keywords for any query you typed in, and you can see a trend curve with the number of impressions each keyword received. For more SEO opportunities, the tool also displays question keywords and newly discovered keywords.

Bing Webmaster Tools Related Keywords

For each keyword you check with the tool, you will see the top 10 URLs for each keyword on Bing Search result pages as well as the broader topic associated with it at the bottom.

A useful tool for ensuring that you understand the level of competition for each keyword on Bing Search. You'll also discover what users are most likely to want to see for each keyword.

As a result, the tool is critical for Bing SEO. It's useful for general SEO because it's free.

Site Scanners and SEO Reports

The SEO reports will tell you if your pages have any addressable SEO issues that need to be addressed. It will display important information about the errors and assign them a severity rating of high, moderate, or low.

It can, for example, tell you if one of your pages is missing an h1 tag.

Bing SEO Report

It speeds up the process of identifying errors and instructs you on how to resolve them. It's user-friendly for beginners, and you'll learn a lot as you go through the process of resolving these issues.

A site scan of your entire website, sitemap, or URLs list is also an option.

The goal of a regular site scan is to identify common technical SEO issues on your website that you can fix to improve Bing's performance.

The site scan focuses on ranking factors that are important to Bing, making the feature an important tool for Bing SEO in general.

Control Crawling, Block URLs, and Test Robots.txt

You can control how Bing crawls your website under the configuration tab.

You can, for example, control when Bing crawls your website. You can schedule crawling for times when your website is expected to receive the least amount of traffic, improving performance during traffic peaks.

The Block URLs feature is self-explanatory in that it allows you to prevent specific URLs from being indexed by Bing Search. Useful for managing duplicate content or unnecessary pages that you don't want Bing Search traffic to.

Under the tools & enhancements tab, you can also test and edit your robot.txt files. You can verify an IP address associated with Bingbots in the same tab.

In Bing Webmaster Tools, you can add users.

Each site's Bing Webmaster account can have multiple users. Depending on your requirements, the user type accounts can have varying restrictions.

How to add Users in Bing Webmaster Tools?

Users can be of two types:

Administrators

Read-Only

Read-Write

Adding users is simple: click the Add User- button, enter an email address, role, and access scope, and a verification email will be sent to the users you added.

Conclusion

Incorporating Bing Webmaster Tools into your SEO toolkit, or simply tracking the performance of organic traffic from Bing, is an excellent addition that is also free.

Making sure your website is crawled by Bing is a critical first step in Bing SEO. Even if you're not actively growing your Bing presence, the suite of tools can benefit your websites and business in other ways.

As a website owner or online marketer, we hope you now have a better understanding of all of the use cases and benefits of using Bing Webmaster Tools.