Google may get most of the attention, but Bing is quietly keeping up with the search giant in the mobile SEO game. Back in March, you may not have noticed anything special about Bing’s mobile search results compared to what you would see on a desktop. Around this time, it was announced that Bing would be adapting a “mobile-first, cloud-first” world. Today, Bing uses device-specific crawlers that probe websites to determine their mobile friendliness.
The number of mobile web users has steadily increased over the years, going from 400 million users in 2007 to 1.8 billion users in 2014, according to research from comScore. This is the first time that mobile web usage is expected to surpass that of a desktop, even with the many difficulties that still exist across mobile devices, such as slower loading times, typing on a tiny keyboard and dealing with websites that aren’t yet optimized for mobile. What this tells us is that people are willing to sacrifice some user-friendliness for on-the-go convenience and access.
To improve the search experience for users and provide them with higher quality results, Bing has implemented a new ranking system that ranks web pages on a number of factors. Only the best ranking websites are shown in the top results, giving users better results when they use their mobile devices for browsing, shopping or researching products. Users can expect Bing to be similar to Google when it comes to mobile SEO.
Below are some of the factors that Bing is taking into account when ranking pages on mobile searches.
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Overall mobile friendliness
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Content compatibility
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Content readability
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Mobile functionality
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Loading times
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URLs directing users to mobile versions
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Flash pages
Bing recommends that all websites be optimized for mobile, have a responsive design and allow its crawlers access. This recent update is just the start of the improvement of mobile search queries, and Bing expects to hold the bar high in order to make the mobile search experience as productive as possible for users.
