Category: Bing

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Get Ready for Voice Search – It’s Coming!

Beautiful woman talking on phone
Get ready to connect with prospects via voice search.

Voice search – it’s coming faster than you think, and I am already having clients ask how they can get ready now.

Here is some information to get you started thinking about what you need to do to be ready for voice search.

First what exactly is voice search?

Voice search is where you speak into a computer or smartphone and the device then performs a search for you returning relevant information and reading the most relevant information to you.

So how can you even get ready for something like this?

  1. Make sure you take time to do a content review. Clean up, slim down content, review page titles and page meta tags and slim and trim what you have to be concise.
  2. Use two and three word search phases as the focus of your content. Voice search will not be focused on the long tail phases.
  3. Make sure you have your full address including city and spelled out state and your phone number that is clickable on all your website pages. To place on near me searches you have to have your location spelled out! Search engines will deliver your content for near me searches only when you are in close proximity to the end user.
  4. Work to improve relevancy of your content and start to strip down your pages and break long content into multiple pages so that pages are on one topic, searchable by search engines and deliver answers to questions.

GoDaddy did a nice article on this topic and I encourage you to check it out for more information.

If you haven’t really looked over your website lately, it may be time to get a consultant to help you make changes. Find out more about our services at https://www.mccordweb.com.

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Bing Places – Local Business Listings – How to Guide

Bing Ads – A Great Place for Many Businesses
Bing Ads – A Great Place for Many Businesses

Of course you’ve listed your business on Google, but have you grabbed your Bing Places account? With Windows 10 and more Bing integration with this new platform, I am finding my own self on Bing more. So don’t forget you want your own business to be found easier and faster on Bing too as they get more traffic.

Grab Your Listing

First make sure you have a Microsoft ID for your business, then visit Bing Places online at https://www.bingplaces.com/ then go to the site and login and enter in your business phone number. Bing will auto populate a form with what it knows about your business. You can then either claim the listing or create a new one.

If your old address shows, go ahead and claim it as you have to claim and verify by phone before you can change to your new address.

Update Your Listing

Then work your way through the five or so screens to add information about your business. You’ll be asked to choose one of Bing’s categories for your business. This is not the time to get creative, you’ve got to choose one of theirs. Add pictures to your listing, but they have to be bigger than 468 pixels wide by 360 pixels tall.

Verify Your Listing by Snail Mail

To assure Bing that you are who you say you are, you will for the first time need to verify your listing by snail mail. Bing will regular mail you a postcard with a PIN. It will typically arrive in less than one week.

There’s No Optimization

Really there is nothing more you can do for your listing. Don’t get fooled into buying any optimization services. There is simply nothing else that can be added to your listing to boost performance.

Do I think it is important to claim your listing – absolutely! Better to provide the “right” information as the business owner than for Bing to guess about your business hours and possibly even use the wrong phone number.