Maximizing the Value of Bing Business Listings

Digital marketers devote a significant proportion of their time to boosting their brands’ visibility with local search engine optimization (local SEO), securing higher rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Google dominates the attention of most digital marketers, as it continues to command roughly 90% of all search engine traffic worldwide.

All the same, the Internet doesn’t start and end with Google. While Bing may be a distant second at just 4% of global search engine traffic, that still translates to handling 900 million search queries per day from 1.4 billion unique users per month.

In other words, Bing’s business directory, Bing Places for Business, harbors real potential for brands seeking to drive footfall to their brick-and-mortar stores. Let’s delve into creating, managing, and optimizing a Bing business listing for your brand.

Why Bing Business Listings Matter for Your Brand

Bing Places for Business is the Microsoft-owned platform’s equivalent of the Google Business Profile (GBP). Both enable brands to claim free local business listings in order to collate accurate, up-to-date information in a format that is easily accessible for customers.

Just like GBP, Bing Places for Business allows brands to select from a wide range of segments and categories when describing their products and services. With this in mind, Bing business listings are relevant for companies in every sector seeking to boost their online visibility, drive customer engagement, and increase in-store footfall.

Most differences in user demographics for Google and Bing appear negligible; Bing users skew very slightly older, for one. Bing remains the default search engine on Windows devices, so users must actively choose to search elsewhere. What’s more, Bing powers Yahoo’s search function. These factors all point to Bing business listings’ ability to augment a brand’s online footprint.

Maximizing your footprint is a key tenet of digital marketing. Ensuring visibility across multiple search platforms helps potential customers find your business wherever they look. Given its ability to enhance the visibility of a brand and its stores, Bing Places for Business listings represent low-hanging fruit when it comes to local SEO.

How to Create a Bing Places for Business Listing: Step-by-Step

Setting up a Bing Places for Business listing is straightforward. You can complete the process in just a few steps.

1. Sign In to Your Microsoft Account

Head to the Bing Places for Business website.

If you already have a Microsoft account you wish to use to manage your listing, click “Existing user”. If you don’t have a Microsoft account, or wish to set up a dedicated account for your business, click “New user”.

2. Claim Your Listing

At this point, you have two choices.

If you’ve already established an accurate, well-maintained listing on Google Business Profile, you can choose to import data directly from GBP. Bing then collects data from your GBP listing to populate your Bing Places for Business listing.

If you don’t yet have a GBP listing, you can claim your locations manually. In this method, you choose your business type and country from dropdown menus before searching for your business using its NAP data. Bing will then show businesses that best match those inputs. If one of the results is your business, click “Claim business”. If your business is not listed, click “Create new business” and enter its details.

For multi-location brands with more than ten stores, the verification process is slightly different: enter your brand name, website, and how many stores you operate, followed by NAP data for each location.

3. Supplement Your Listing

On the next screen, you can enter a brief description and augment your listing with photos on top of adding extensive information about your listing.

Check that your NAP data is correct and that the map accurately displays your location. At this stage, you can select a business segment and a handful of categories, which assists Bing in understanding your offering.

Make sure your choices reflect your core activities instead of including every possible product or service. Your focus should be on ensuring that potential customers — and Bing’s algorithms – can identify what your business does as easily as possible.

4. Verify Your Listing

The methods for verifying your listing depend on the information you provide.

For example, if you import data from a verified GBP listing, your Bing for Places listing should already be pre-verified.

Otherwise, much like for GBP listings, you may have to enter a PIN sent via text message, automated phone call, or postcard to the specified business address.

How Do Bing Business Listings Boost SEO?

In large part, listings on directories such as Bing Places for Business work to maximize your brand’s footprint, making sure your listings appear omnipresent wherever your customers search online.

On top of that, Bing business listings specifically boost local enterprises’ rankings in Bing search results. Bing’s local search algorithm considers three primary factors to rank results: relevance, distance, and popularity. Claiming, completing, and updating a Bing business listing allows the algorithm to assess all three aspects effectively and push you to the top of results for relevant queries.

More broadly, Bing Places for Business listings represent local SEO citations from a trusted provider. This means that accurate Bing listings can also improve your search rankings on Google and other search engines.

Best Practices for Bing Places for Business

So, you’ve claimed your Bing Places for Business listing: an important first step. Next, you should seek to exploit its full potential with several optimizations.

Cleanse Your NAP Data

First things first: ensure your NAP data is flawless. Potential customers need to locate accurate, up-to-date information about your stores as easily as possible. Consistent data across multiple directories also demonstrates credibility and authority to search engines.

Manual data maintenance is time-consuming and inherently carries an added risk of human error. However, this repetitive review process is ripe for automation: data cleansing services can automate this process while guaranteeing absolute precision.

Don’t forget to update your business hours: Bing sets listings’ hours to 24/7 by default.

Research Impactful Keywords

A Bing Places for Business profile doesn’t afford many chances to integrate keywords. This makes it all the more important that you seize opportunities wherever possible.

Research relevant keywords for local SEO, focusing on your core products and services. In addition to your selected business segment and categories, Bing also scrutinizes your listing’s name and description to understand your offering and assess its relevance – so make sure to incorporate keywords here.

This doesn’t mean stuffing dozens of semi-relevant keywords into your description. Instead, identify a small set of keywords that respond directly to a specific search intent.

Leverage Positive Customer Reviews

Unlike Google’s platform, Bing Places for Business doesn’t feature an integrated customer review function. Instead, Bing pulls reviews from other trusted sources, such as TripAdvisor and Facebook.

You could regard this as a positive, as it extends the reach of customer reviews without requiring any input on your part. However, it also underscores the importance of effective review management: proactively soliciting reviews, monitoring numerous review sites, as well as responding appropriately to both positive and negative reviews.

For Bing’s local ranking algorithm, high numbers of positive reviews across trusted sites represent a sign of popularity, which Bing rewards with higher visibility in research results.

Enrich Your Listing with Images

When displaying local search results, Bing places a strong emphasis on images. A strip of images appears at the top of Bing Search results, while Bing Maps shows a panel of images as standard.

You should respond by uploading high-quality images that provide a clear impression of what you offer. Bing allows you to upload up to 100 photos and issues useful guidelines on what to include:

• Two photos of your storefront to help customers recognize it
• Several photos of the interior to give customers an idea of what to expect
• Photos of specific products or services, especially for restaurants, bars, and cafés
• Photos of awards or events

Moving forward, you should review the photos displayed on your profile at regular intervals to ensure they still provide accurate, up-to-date insights about your location.

The Value of Specialist Listings Management Tools

As part of a broader Microsoft-owned platform, Bing Places for Business has an outsized impact as a business directory and can boost your visibility across numerous search engine, and especially in Bing Search results.

At the same time, Bing Places for Business is similar to most other directories. This opens the door to a standardized, automated management approach. Specialist listings management tools ensure consistency and accuracy by allowing users to manage numerous listings from a single source, propagating data updates across multiple directories with absolute precision.

Uberall as a Listings Management Solution

Looking for a specialist location marketing tool to elevate your listings management to the next level? Look no further than Uberall.

The Uberall listings management software platform is the ideal choice for multi-location businesses, enabling business owners and marketers to create, manage, and optimize listings across a network of more than 125 leading business directories from a single, intuitive interface with accurate, insightful data.

With data cleansing functions and recommendations for maintaining complete and consistent listings across the board, Uberall empowers you to impress customers from the outset.

Interested? Book a demo today to learn how Uberall can help refine your online footprint.