The Other Search Engines (And Why They're Still Worth Five Minutes)

Almost everything written about SEO is about Google. That makes sense — Google is around 90% of search in Australia. But that other 10% includes Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and various smaller engines, and many of them quietly source their results from Bing's index.

Bing also happens to be the default search on every freshly installed copy of Windows, plus the search engine behind Microsoft Edge's address bar and a long tail of other software your customers might be using without realising.

It's a small slice of the pie, but it's free and easy to claim. Here's how.

Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing Webmaster Tools is Bing's equivalent of Google Search Console — a free dashboard showing you what's happening with your site in Bing's results. Setup takes about five minutes:

1. Sign in with a Microsoft account
2. Add your website
3. Verify ownership (the easiest method imports your existing Google Search Console verification — no extra setup required)

Once it's running, you get:

• Search performance — Which Bing searches are bringing visitors to your site, what positions you appear at, click-through rates
• Crawl errors — Pages Bing can't reach, broken links, redirect loops
• Sitemap submission — Tells Bing where to find every page on your site
• Backlink data — A view of who's linking to your site, often more generous than Google's free version

For most small businesses, the data overlaps significantly with what Google Search Console already shows — but the few percent of differences can be useful, and the setup cost is nearly zero.

Bing Places for Business

If you have a physical business — shop, office, anywhere customers can visit — there's a separate listing platform: Bing Places for Business. The equivalent of Google Business Profile, but for Bing Maps.

A Bing Places listing gives you:

• A free entry on Bing Maps
• Your business hours, phone number, photos, and reviews shown to anyone searching on Bing
• The ability to import most of the data straight from your Google Business Profile, so you're not setting it up from scratch

Local searches on Microsoft Edge (which ships with every new Windows machine) hit Bing first. For a local business in a smaller town like Burnie, that's a real percentage of potential foot traffic — not huge, but free.

Where this fits in your SEO effort

Don't spend a single hour optimising for Bing at the expense of Google. The relative traffic isn't there.

But spending an hour once to set up Bing Webmaster Tools and Bing Places is a good return on investment. After that they run themselves. You get an occasional issue notification if something breaks, your site shows up better in non-Google searches, and your local listing appears in one extra place customers might be looking.

What about other search engines?

• DuckDuckGo — Privacy-focused, growing slowly. Sources most of its results from Bing's index. Get Bing right and you get DuckDuckGo for free.
• Yahoo — Also Bing-powered now. Same deal.
• Yandex (Russia) and Baidu (China) — Only worth caring about if you're specifically targeting those markets.

The bottom line

Google deserves the bulk of your SEO attention. But Bing Webmaster Tools and Bing Places are free, take fifteen minutes to set up between them, and quietly cover the remaining 10% of search traffic plus secondary engines like DuckDuckGo. Set it up once, then forget about it.

Get in touch if you'd like a hand setting up either tool, or auditing your current local search presence across Google, Bing, and Apple Maps.