Who doesn’t love free tools when it comes to SEO? I use a lot of different tools day in and day out and when other people talk about tools for SEO, reports, etc. it seems that Google Webmaster Tools is mentioned much more often than the emerging Bing Webmaster Tools.
A lot of people place 100% of their focus on Google and overlook the power of Bing. In this case, it isn’t really about search engine market share but more about additional tools available to you.
Adding Bing Webmaster Tools to Your Arsenal
There are a quite of few cool things that Bing webmaster tools offer, such as:
- Keyword Research and Trends (Bing organic search)
- Link Explorer
- Markup Validator
- SEO Analyzer (On page issues)
- SEO Reports
- Inbound Link Reporting
- $100 Bing Search Ad Credit for Signing Up
To sign up for Bing Webmaster Tools just follow this link.
Keyword Research and Trends
This is a pretty cool tool to use, most people just focus on the Google Adwords Keyword Planner and never look at the search volume in Bing.
Here’s an example screenshot of their keyword research tool:
You simply enter in the keyword(s) you want to research, and they’ll also provide you with “suggestions” similar to what the keyword planner tool does with Google.
This won’t really be beneficial if you’re looking at search volume for Local SEO, but neither is the Google Keyword Planner. Great tool however, to look at data for the Bing organic searches.
Bing’s Link Explorer
This is probably my favorite part of Bing Webmaster Tools.
A few years ago, there was Yahoo Site Explorer which pretty much everyone used to look at the backlinks of competitors. Yahoo shut it down and everyone was left to 3rd party tools for links, such as ahrefs or majestic SEO. This is essentially Bing’s version of the Yahoo Site Explorer, but on a smaller level.
It’s a great free alternative to Ahrefs and other paid tools out there. You can analyze other company or competitor backlinks, steal the backlinks, etc.
For example, here is a screen shot of the link explorer when I was looking at the links that “shoutmeloud” has, which is a blog similar to this one but of course not as great 🙂
This is only showing 3 of the backlinks, but since I don’t want this blog post to just be a screen shot of links, I decided to cut it off. Bing shows me a total of 292 backlinks that they have.
The only bad thing about it, is that they don’t index backlinks nearly as fast as the Yahoo site explorer did back in the day. I would bet other tools show at least 4-5X the amount of backlinks so I guess it’s true that you get what you pay for!
Bing Webmaster Tools Overall..
They certainly aren’t as advanced as Google but Bing Webmaster Tools is something that everybody should have setup anyway. It only makes sense. Perhaps you won’t be analyzing data or diving into the tools nearly as much as you do with Google, but heck, for $100 in free ad spend, why the hell not?
The nice surprise for me, and this is where Bing does have an advantage over Google, is the Link Explorer feature. Google allows you to see links to your OWN website but not to other websites. This is an area I hope to see Bing expand on, it would be an even better free tool for the SEO community.
That sums it up guys… go ahead and setup Bing Webmaster Tools, it takes less than 5 minutes.
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Dang it! I just signed up for Bing ads last week and got $50 ad credit. Now, it seems I can’t get the $100. Oh well.
Oh, and thanks for letting me know about Bing Webmaster. I signed up for Google Webmaster a month ago. Signed up for Bing ads last week, and I didn’t know anything about Bing Webmaster. Just signed into it and got indexed. Few!
Haha, guess I posted this a week late then! I guess you can create an alternative account and still get the credit.
Ha, yeah. No worries!
Since you’re talking about Bing, what do you think Search Ads and Content Ads? Maybe another blog post… Should we be using both?
Maybe. I’ve used only search ads with Bing so I can’t say using my own experience. My thinking was that Google has a much more advanced anti-click-fraud detection algorithm than bing does, so you wouldn’t be getting the most for your money. Search ads, however, I think are the higher quality option.
I really should do some advanced testing on it, but I never thought the content ads with Bing would be worth it.
Good to know.
I stopped doing the content ads and now my click rate went waaay down. Seems I need to up my search ad bids.
I need more free money. Ill be getting my 100 bing ad credit. Poker freerolls are just not cuttin it anymore.
How did it go john? Did you ever get the ad credit and use it?
I had used it in other websites before. Looks pretty cool for indexing and always ready for $100 SEO credit. Thanks for putting this together