Bing Webmaster Tools: How To Get Started (Tutorial)

Setting up a Bing Webmaster Tools account comes with many benefits. It helps bridge the gap between you and Bing, providing valuable insights into how your site performs in search results. More importantly, it’s the only direct channel to communicate with Bing and optimize your site for better visibility.

In this step-by-step tutorial, you’ll learn how to get started with Bing Webmaster Tools and make the most of its features.

What Is Bing Webmaster Tools?

Bing Webmaster Tools is the equivalent of Google Search Console, often referred to as Bing Console. It’s a free platform provided by Microsoft that helps website owners monitor and manage their site’s presence in Bing search results.

Just like Google Search Console, it offers essential tools to improve your SEO, track performance, and troubleshoot any issues that might prevent your site from ranking well on Bing.

Why Use Bing Webmaster Tools?

There is a lot of information in Bing webmaster tools, but as a beginner, you should expect the following:

• To receive important messages or warnings about the healthiness of your website (e.g,. malware)
• To find out how many pages are indexed by Bing
• To find out how many links are pointing to your site
• To troubleshoot crawler access issues
• To see detailed information on what keywords your site is associated with and your position in the search results. This is especially important for SEO purposes.

How To Verify Your Website With Bing And Submit a Sitemap

The first step in using Bing is creating an account, verifying your website, and submitting your XML Sitemap. Let's see how to do this step-by-step.

Step 1: Go to Bing Webmaster Tools and click SIGN UP.

Step 2: You can create a Bing webmaster account using your Microsoft, Google, or Facebook account. Select your preferred method and proceed to the next step.

Step 3: Enter your website URL in the top box and click ADD

Step 4: Specify the location of your XML sitemap and click ADD. You can leave the default settings for the ‘time of the day’ options.

Step 5: Verify your website.

You can verify your site ownership with Bing using one of the three methods.

1. Download the BingSiteAuth.xml file and upload it to the root folder of your site.
2. Add a meta tag in the HEADER of your homepage
3. Add a CNAME record to your DNS.

The easiest and fastest method is to download the BingSiteAuth.xml file and upload it using an FTP client to the root folder of your website.

Then, you can return to this screen and click the VERIFY button.

Note: You need to keep the file in your root folder all the time, so do not delete it after verification.

How to Manually Submit a URL to Bing

Bing encourages webmasters to use the submit URL feature to notify them about new content, which can speed up the crawling and indexing process.

All major search engines have this feature, but Bing, in particular, wants webmasters to use it, especially for news websites or changes made to existing content.

• Click on URL Submission from the left menu.
• Click Submit URLs
• Enter the URLs you want to submit to Bing and click SUBMIT.

You can use this feature to submit 10,000 URLS per day.

How to Review Bing SEO Recommendations

The SEO Reports give recommendations related to Bing's Best SEO Practices. You should follow and fix the recommendations to increase your website’s exposure in Bing organic results.

You can access the report by visiting "Recommendations" from the left menu.

How To View Backlinks To Your Website Or Any Website

One of the unique features of Bing Webmaster tools is the backlinks report. Besides getting details for your backlinks, you can view and compare backlinks for any website.

Click "Backlinks" from the left menu and then "Backlinks To Any Site".

Click the "+" button to add one or more websites and get information on their backlinks.

How To Perform Keyword Research With Bing

Bing also has a keyword research tool. This tool is useful if you want to know how many times a keyword is searched on Bing.

It doesn’t have all the features of the Google Keyword Planner, but it is still the place to find out what search terms are entered in the Bing Search Box.

You can access the tool by clicking "Keyword Research" from the left menu.

How To Analyze Your Bing Search Traffic

The "Search Performance" report shows the amount of traffic your website received from Bing (and Yahoo) and for which keywords. It does not include traffic data from Microsoft Copilot or other AI chats powered by Bing.

Other Bing Webmaster Tools Features

While the features mentioned above are essential for getting started, Bing Webmaster Tools offers several other useful options:

Crawl Control – Adjust how often Bing crawls your website to balance server load and ensure timely updates.

Block URLs – Prevent specific URLs from being crawled or indexed by BingBot.

Site Explorer – Provides a detailed view of your website’s structure, allowing you to inspect and manage your pages and folders.

Site Scan – Run a site audit to detect SEO issues, broken links, and other technical problems that need fixing.

Robots.txt Tester – Test your robots.txt file to ensure BingBot is allowed to access the right sections of your site.

Verify BingBot – Confirm whether a crawling request is genuinely from BingBot and not a malicious bot impersonation.

Next Steps

Bing webmaster tools have all the features you need to optimize your website for Bing SEO. They are simple and easy to use, but they are not as intelligent as Google Search Console.

My recommendation is to review all options and ensure that you provide Bing with all the information it needs about your website. Then, once in a while, go back and check for errors.