Guide on Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing is more than just a search engine. It also offers a suite of tools for webmasters, marketers, and developers to optimize their websites and gain insights into their users’ behavior. In this blog post, we will introduce you to Bing Webmaster Tools, the main Bing analytics tool, and some other Bing tools that can help you enhance your site’s functionality and user experience.

What is Bing Webmaster Tools?

Bing Webmaster Tools is a free service that allows you to monitor your site’s health, performance, and ranking on Bing and other search engines. You can use Bing Webmaster Tools to:

  • Submit your site’s sitemap and URL to Bing for indexing
  • Analyze your site’s SEO and SEM performance and get recommendations for improvement
  • Track your site’s impressions, clicks, and CTR on Bing
  • Diagnose and fix crawl errors, broken links, and malware issues
  • Discover keywords and topics that drive traffic to your site
  • Compare your site’s performance with competitors
  • Access various reports and data sources such as backlinks, keyword research, page speed, mobile friendliness, etc.

To use Bing Webmaster Tools, you need to verify your site ownership by adding a meta tag, uploading an XML file, or using DNS verification. You can also integrate Bing Webmaster Tools with Google Search Console to get a comprehensive view of your site’s performance across both search engines.

You can sign up for Bing Webmaster Tools here: https://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster/

How to use Bing Webmaster Tools?

Once you have verified your site ownership and submitted your sitemap, you can access the Bing Webmaster Tools dashboard. Here are some of the features and reports that you can use to analyze your site’s performance:

  • Dashboard: The dashboard gives you an overview of your site’s status, such as crawl errors, index status, sitemap status, etc. You can also see the summary of your site’s traffic data, such as impressions, clicks, CTR, average position, etc. You can filter the data by date range, device type, country/region, etc.
  • SEO tools: The SEO tools section provides you with various tools to optimize your site’s SEO. Some of the tools are:
    • Backlinks: This tool allows you to analyze your site’s backlink profile, such as the referring pages, domains, and anchor texts. You can also see the inbound links from other sites that are verified in your account.
    • Keyword research: This tool allows you to check the phrases and keywords that searchers are querying for and their corresponding search volumes. You can also see the related keywords and their trends.
    • SEO report: This tool provides you with a monthly report of all the SEO issues found across your entire website. You can see the aggregated counts of errors by category, such as title tags, meta descriptions, content quality, etc. You can also see the details of each error and how to fix it.
    • Site scan: This tool allows you to perform an on-demand site audit that crawls your site and checks for common technical SEO issues. You can see the summary of issues by category, such as HTTPS implementation, robots.txt file, canonical tags, etc. You can also see the details of each issue and how to fix it.
  • Reporting tools: The reporting tools section provides you with various reports and data sources to measure your site’s performance and effectiveness. Some of the reports are:
    • Page traffic: This report shows you the traffic data for each page on your site, such as impressions, clicks, CTR, average position, etc. You can filter the data by date range, device type, country/region, etc.
    • Search keywords: This report shows you the keywords that drive traffic to your site from Bing search results. You can see the impressions, clicks, CTR, average position, etc. for each keyword. You can also see the pages that rank for each keyword.
    • Search appearance: This report shows you how your site appears on Bing search results with different features such as rich snippets (e.g., reviews), rich captions (e.g., images), answer boxes (e.g., definitions), etc. You can see the impressions and clicks for each feature type.
    • Index explorer: This tool allows you to explore how Bing has indexed your site and its pages. You can see the URL details such as crawl date, HTTP status code, content type, etc. You can also submit URLs for indexing or removal.
  • Diagnostic tools: The diagnostic tools section provides you with various tools to troubleshoot and fix any issues on your site. Some of the tools are:
    • Crawl information: This tool shows you the information about Bing’s crawl activity on your site, such as the number of pages crawled, the crawl rate, the crawl errors, etc. You can also see the details of each crawl error and how to fix it.
    • Fetch as Bingbot: This tool allows you to see how Bingbot sees your site and its pages. You can see the HTTP response, the HTML source code, and the rendered page. You can also use this tool to test your robots.txt file and your sitemap file.
    • Markup validator: This tool allows you to validate the structured data markup on your site and its pages. You can see the detected schema types, properties, and values. You can also see any errors or warnings in your markup.
    • Site move: This tool allows you to notify Bing about any changes in your site’s URL structure, such as domain change, protocol change, path change, etc. You can also see the status of your site move requests.
  • Communication: The communication section allows you to receive personalized messages and alerts from Bing about your site’s status and performance. You can also contact Bing support for any questions or issues.

What are some other Bing tools?

Besides Bing Webmaster Tools, Bing also offers other tools that can help you enhance your site’s functionality and user experience. Some of these tools are:

  • Bing Maps: A mapping service that allows you to embed interactive maps on your site, add location-based features such as geocoding, routing, directions, etc., and access rich data sets such as traffic, demographics, landmarks, etc.
  • Bing Custom Search: A service that allows you to create your own customized search engine for your site or app, with full control over the appearance, ranking, and filtering of the results.
  • Bing Entity Search: A service that allows you to enrich your site or app with information about entities such as people, places, things, etc., from the Bing Knowledge Graph.
  • Bing Speech: A service that allows you to add speech recognition and synthesis capabilities to your site or app, enabling voice-based interactions with your users.
  • Bing Spell Check: A service that allows you to detect and correct spelling errors in your site or app content.

You can learn more about these tools here: https://www.bing.com/dev/en-us


Ashish Tiwari