Bing Webmaster Tools helps SEO by showing how Bing discovers, crawls, indexes and ranks your website. It also reports keyword and backlink data, flags technical problems, lets you submit updated URLs and provides recommendations for improving search visibility.

Bing Webmaster Tools does not directly improve rankings. Its value is diagnostic: it helps you find and fix problems that could stop Bing from crawling, indexing or understanding your pages. Bing also provides up to six months of Search Performance data, which helps you compare visibility over time.

Bing Webmaster Tools SEO Benefits at a Glance

Bing Webmaster Tools feature How it helps SEO
Search Performance Shows which keywords, pages and search results generate impressions and clicks
URL Inspection Checks indexing, crawling, SEO and structured data issues on individual URLs
Site Scan Finds technical SEO issues across your website
Site Explorer Shows indexed, excluded, redirected, blocked and problematic URLs
Keyword Research Provides keyword ideas, search trends, questions and competing URLs
Backlinks Shows referring domains, linking pages and anchor text detected by Bing
IndexNow Notifies Bing when pages are added, updated or removed
Sitemaps Helps Bing discover important URLs and monitor sitemap processing
Recommendations Provides prioritised SEO guidance for your verified website

1. It Shows Which Keywords and Pages Are Performing

The Search Performance report shows the queries that trigger your pages in Bing search. It includes impressions, clicks, click-through rate and average position. Bing also reports visibility across web results, image results, news answers, knowledge panels and chat responses.

You can use this data to:

  • Find pages with many impressions but few clicks
  • Identify keywords where a page ranks close to the top
  • Discover relevant queries that your content does not target directly
  • Compare different pages and site sections
  • Check whether an SEO change improved Bing visibility

A page with many impressions but a low click-through rate may need a more specific title tag or meta description. A page ranking between positions 5 and 15 may benefit from stronger content, better internal links or a clearer search-result snippet.

Bing provides up to six months of Search Performance data, so you can compare recent changes with earlier results.

2. It Identifies Why Individual Pages Are Not Indexed

The URL Inspection tool checks a specific URL for indexing status, crawl problems, SEO issues and structured markup. It can show whether Bing discovered, crawled and indexed the page, along with its HTTP response and relevant HTML details.

URL Inspection can reveal issues such as:

  • A page blocked by robots.txt
  • A page containing a noindex directive
  • Server errors or incorrect HTTP status codes
  • Redirect problems
  • SEO issues detected in the page source
  • Problems with JSON-LD, Open Graph or other supported markup
  • Differences between the page users see and the content Bingbot receives

The Live URL feature tests the current version of a page instead of relying only on Bing's stored version. After an important update, you can also request indexing, subject to Bing's submission limits.

Use URL Inspection after:

  • Publishing a new page
  • Changing a canonical URL
  • Fixing a technical error
  • Moving a page
  • Updating important content
  • Investigating a sudden loss of visibility

3. It Audits Technical SEO Problems Across the Site

Site Scan crawls a website and checks for common technical SEO issues. Bing describes it as an on-demand audit tool for improving search-engine accessibility and user experience.

A scan can find problems involving:

  • Broken links
  • Missing or duplicate metadata
  • Redirects
  • Canonicalisation
  • URL parameters
  • Crawl depth
  • Page-level SEO errors
  • Sitemap and crawl issues

You can set the scan scope, maximum number of pages, crawl depth and crawling speed. That lets you audit an entire site or focus on a subdomain, directory or other section.

URL Inspection explains why one page has a problem. Site Scan shows whether the same problem appears across hundreds or thousands of URLs. That makes it more useful for finding site-wide patterns.

4. It Helps You Understand Your Site's Index Coverage

Site Explorer provides a navigable view of the URLs Bing has discovered on your website. It groups URLs into folders and shows details such as clicks, impressions, backlinks and crawl status.

You can filter URLs by categories such as:

  • Indexed URLs
  • URLs with 404 or 410 errors
  • Server errors
  • URLs disallowed by robots.txt
  • URLs with a noindex directive
  • Redirecting URLs
  • Canonical source URLs
  • URLs with guideline issues
  • URLs that have not been crawled
  • URLs affected by malware

This is useful on large websites, where indexation problems are difficult to find manually. Site Explorer can show that an important product category is excluded, a group of pages is blocked by robots.txt or obsolete URLs are still discoverable.

5. It Supports Keyword Research and Content Planning

The Keyword Research tool provides related keywords, search-volume trends, question keywords and recently relevant keyword ideas. You can filter the results by country, language, device and timeframe.

The tool also shows:

  • Keyword search trends
  • Global search-volume breakdowns
  • Questions associated with a topic
  • The top 10 URLs for a root keyword
  • Topics that Bing associates with those URLs

You can use these results to:

  1. Check whether a topic has search demand.
  2. Find questions your page should answer.
  3. Identify related subtopics to cover.
  4. Compare your content with pages already appearing in Bing results.
  5. Adapt content for a particular country, language or device audience.

Search volume does not replace search intent. A lower-volume question may be more valuable when it closely matches your audience's needs and leads to a relevant product, service or enquiry.

The Backlinks report shows referring domains, referring pages, target URLs and anchor text detected by Bing. You can also compare your backlink profile with up to two other websites.

The report can help you:

  • Find websites that already link to your content
  • Identify pages receiving the most external links
  • Review the anchor text used for your website
  • Find domains that link to competing sites
  • Spot content opportunities that may attract useful links

Bing says its backlink report is a representative set, not a complete backlink profile. Use it alongside other backlink and analytics data rather than treating it as a complete list of every link to your website.

7. It Helps Bing Discover Updated Content Faster

IndexNow lets website owners notify Bing and participating search engines when URLs are added, updated or removed. This can help search engines find changes sooner than they would through a normal crawl.

IndexNow is useful for:

  • News websites
  • Ecommerce inventory and pricing pages
  • Frequently updated databases
  • Job listings
  • Event pages
  • Websites that publish content regularly

IndexNow does not guarantee that Bing will index or rank a URL. It is a notification system, not a ranking shortcut. Its SEO value is helping Bing discover changes more quickly and accurately.

Bing also recommends XML sitemaps that contain canonical URLs, accurate lastmod values and no deleted or redirected URLs. Sitemaps help Bing understand which URLs matter and when content changed, but they do not guarantee search visibility.

8. It Gives Prioritised SEO Recommendations

The Recommendations feature analyses indexed pages from a verified website and provides personalised guidance based on search-optimisation practices. The recommendations are refreshed periodically and help site owners focus on tasks that may improve visibility and discoverability.

This is useful when there are more SEO tasks than development time. You can review the recommendations first, then decide which issues affect important pages and deserve attention.

Review each recommendation before implementing it. A suggestion that is valid in general may not suit a particular page type, application or business requirement.

Does Bing Webmaster Tools Improve Google SEO?

Bing Webmaster Tools can help you find SEO issues that may also affect Google, but it is specific to Bing and cannot replace Google Search Console.

Problems such as broken links, blocked resources, incorrect redirects, weak internal linking and duplicate URLs can affect more than one search engine. Bing Webmaster Tools can therefore provide another source of technical SEO data.

Bing and Google still use different search systems, ranking signals and reporting datasets. Strong performance in Bing Webmaster Tools does not guarantee equivalent performance in Google Search.

Use:

  • Bing Webmaster Tools for Bing crawling, indexing, search performance and Microsoft search visibility
  • Google Search Console for Google indexing, queries, performance and Google-specific diagnostics
  • Web analytics for user behaviour, conversions and business outcomes
  • A crawler for broader technical audits and large-scale site analysis

How to Use Bing Webmaster Tools for SEO

A practical workflow looks like this:

  1. Verify your website in Bing Webmaster Tools.
  2. Submit the XML sitemap and check whether Bing can process it.
  3. Review Search Performance for pages with high impressions and low clicks.
  4. Run Site Scan to find recurring technical problems.
  5. Use Site Explorer to investigate excluded, blocked, redirected and error URLs.
  6. Inspect important pages individually with URL Inspection.
  7. Use Keyword Research to expand content and find question-based search demand.
  8. Review backlinks for authority and content-promotion opportunities.
  9. Configure IndexNow if your website changes frequently.
  10. Check Recommendations and prioritise fixes affecting important indexed pages.

The Main Limitation

Bing Webmaster Tools helps diagnose and improve SEO, but it cannot guarantee rankings, traffic or indexing. Bing's own guidance says that strong discovery signals, accurate sitemaps and SEO best practices support indexing and visibility, but they do not guarantee prominent search rankings.

The most useful way to view Bing Webmaster Tools is as a diagnostic and measurement platform. It shows what Bing sees, helps identify crawling and indexing barriers, supports content research, reports backlink data and gives you a way to respond when important URLs change.