Yes, Bing SEO. While most people immediately think of Google when it comes to SEO, those who don't think about Bing are missing out on a valuable opportunity to rank higher and get more traffic. Below, I'll give you eight reasons why you should pay attention to Bing SEO. Bing SEO has less competition We'll address the most obvious problems first. Obviously, we enjoy a web dominated by Google. In fact, we don't even "search" for things on the web anymore; we "Google" them. That means most sites are struggling to push their way to the top of Google — and spend far less time optimizing smaller sites like Bing. Also keep in mind that Bing is second only to Google in terms of search traffic, accounting for 30% of searches. But these are not limitations. They are opportunities. It gives you a great opportunity to take advantage of Bing while your competitors are busy improving Google's SEO. This is especially useful for small sites that may not be able to crack Google's first page. This is also a great opportunity for new business to gain significant traffic. Industry veterans may have spent years building their Google presence, making it difficult for new ventures to compete. Top brands tend to rank higher, just like they rank on Google. Social signals are strongly associated with higher rankings. Backlink numbers also correlate strongly with higher rankings. Relevant and high-quality content is important for search rankings. On the page, technical factors also play an important role. Bing SEO: Social Signal Count One of the biggest industry mailing list between Google's and Bing's algorithms is that Bing does treat social signals as a ranking factor. Google has long maintained that social signals are not actually a ranking factor (although there is plenty of evidence that it is an indirect ranking factor.) But on the other hand, Bing leads the way in the use of social signals. This means that well-targeted results in Bing generally tend to have more shares, likes, tweets, and +1s, and that specific URLs stand out among the top results with lots of social signals. This is great news for any business that has invested heavily in its social media strategy. Not only did they create more audience engagement, but on the Bing side, they also improved their rankings. Bing SEO: Bing candid about its ranking factors When it comes to Google, ranking factors are often a guessing game. While Bing doesn't reveal all the details on how and what a site can do to rank higher in the SERPs, it's more open. For obvious reasons, this requires a lot of guesswork to optimize your website. Bing walks you through the start-up process and lists useful resources on its ranking factors in its webmaster guide. Even better, Bing offers free tools to help you start your SEO plan. The first is in the Reports and Data section of your account and is called the SEO report. These reports will automatically run on your website every two weeks and return recommendations on how to improve SEO. The second, located in the Diagnostics and Reports section, is Bing's SEO Analyzer. You can use this at your discretion, scan any page and have a report ready for you in no time.