I’ve found that both platforms offer unique advantages that can significantly impact your SEO strategy. While GSC gets a lot of attention, BWT has some fantastic features that often fly under the radar. In this article, I’ll share the top 3 features and insights that make BWT a valuable asset in your SEO strategy. We’ll also compare several of BWT’s features with those in GSC, highlighting how each tool can enhance your SEO efforts.
User Interface and Experience
Bing Webmaster Tools
The modern Bing Webmaster Tools’ experience is more user-friendly, simplified, and intuitive than ever before. Shaped by user feedback, it offers easy access to essential features like performance reports, site diagnostics, and keyword research, allowing webmasters to efficiently manage their site visibility and performance all from one location. One of BWT’s standout features is IndexNow, which ensures that content changes are quickly indexed, thereby enhancing overall site performance. Additionally, it integrates seamlessly with Clarity, Microsoft’s user behavior analytics tool.Google Search Console
Google Search Console (GSC) has long been a favorite among SEO professionals. With its clean and straight forward interface, it focuses on core metrics such as search performance, coverage issues, and mobile usability. GSC offers extensive documentation and support, while its integration with Google Analytics provides a comprehensive view of site performance and user behavior. These features combined help users understand their site’s health and performance metrics, enabling them to make informed decisions to enhance their SEO strategies.Features and Functionality
Bing Webmaster Tools offers a robust set of features designed to enhance SEO efforts and effectiveness. Unique features include:- IndexNow : This more recent addition to the SEO toolbox represents a significant innovation in how websites interact with search engines. With management tools hosted on the Bing Webmaster Tools dashboard (and through most content management systems), IndexNow is a free, open-source protocol allows webmasters to proactively notify search engines of their added, updated, or deleted URL content.
- Why it’s unique: By allowing webmasters to proactively notify search engines of their content as soon as they upload it, IndexNow is helping shift the power of the web back into the hands of content creators, providing webmasters with a direct line for their content into search engines. IndexNow is also supported by multiple content management systems and platforms, making it easily accessible.
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- Why it’s unique: By allowing webmasters to proactively notify search engines of their content as soon as they upload it, IndexNow is helping shift the power of the web back into the hands of content creators, providing webmasters with a direct line for their content into search engines. IndexNow is also supported by multiple content management systems and platforms, making it easily accessible.
- Site Explorer: Provides a comprehensive view of a website’s structure while also offering detailed analytics on clicks, impressions, backlink counts, and more. Use it to uncover high and low-performing pages, fix crawling issues, and optimize your site’s internal linking strategy.
- Unique to Bing Webmaster Tools: Advanced filtering features provide webmasters with access to advanced granular analysis and optimization, allowing them to drill down into specific data points. This makes it easier to identify high and low-performing pages, fix crawling issues, and optimize internal linking strategies that can lead to better search engine rankings and improved website performance.
- Unique to Bing Webmaster Tools: Advanced filtering features provide webmasters with access to advanced granular analysis and optimization, allowing them to drill down into specific data points. This makes it easier to identify high and low-performing pages, fix crawling issues, and optimize internal linking strategies that can lead to better search engine rankings and improved website performance.
- Backlinks for any sites: This insightful tool provides insight into your backlink profile, including domain authority and anchor text. It’s helpful in identifying high-value backlinks, finding link-building opportunities, and monitoring backlink health.
- Unique to Bing Webmaster Tools: By allowing users to see backlinks not only for their own sites but also for other sites, webmasters can gain valuable insight into competitors' link-building strategies, helping identify potential opportunities and gaps in their own strategy.
Now let's see how some of BWT and GSC’s shared features stack up against each other.
- Search Performance:
Both BWT and GSC provide insights into how your website performs in search results. They share several similarities, including metrics for clicks, impressions, average click-through rate (CTR), and average position. Both tools allow you to analyze data over time, track trends, and export data for further analysis. They help webmasters understand which queries drive traffic, how different pages perform, and where improvements can be made to enhance search visibility and traffic.
Each platform has several key differences:
Bing Webmaster Tools:- Data Sources: GSC provides insights into how your site performs specifically in Google search results, web, image, and news.
- Additional Filtering: Offers extensive filtering options, allowing you to filter data by various dimensions such as page URL, country, device, and date, and apply multiple filters simultaneously.
- Data Sources: BWT includes data from various sources such as web search, chat/copilot responses, news, images, videos, and knowledge panels, providing a broader view of your site’s performance across different Bing services
- SEO Reports: Offers detailed SEO error reports and suggestions for improvement based on best practices.
- Crawl and Indexed URLs Data: Provides visibility into crawl requests, crawl errors, and the number of pages successfully indexed by Bing over time, ensuring you can easily connect click trends to crawl and indexing trends.
- Data Sources: GSC provides insights into how your site performs specifically in Google search results, web, image and news.
- Additional Filtering: Offers extensive filtering options, allowing you to filter data by various dimensions such as page URL, country, device and date, and apply multiple filters simultaneously.
- URL Inspection:
Both BWT and GSC offer URL Inspection tools that provide detailed insights into individual URLs on your website. These tools help webmasters understand how search engines perceive their pages and identify any issues that might affect crawling, indexing, or ranking. They share several similarities, including showing crawl status, index status, live URL testing, structured data checks, and error reporting.
Unique differences between the two include:
Bing Webmaster Tools:- SEO Errors: BWT provides detailed SEO error reports based on best practices, offering specific steps to fix them.
- Structured data: BWT helps you see if your chosen structured markup language is implemented correctly for Bing to read and understand.
- Rendered Page View: GSC offers a rendered view of the page, showing how Googlebot sees it, including loaded resources and JavaScript output.
- Sitemaps:
The Sitemaps feature in both BWT and GSC allows webmasters to submit sitemaps to help search engines discover and index their website’s pages more efficiently. Both tools support various sitemap formats, including XML, RSS, and Atom, and provide detailed reports on the status and errors related to submitted sitemaps. They also allow webmasters to resubmit sitemaps and view the number of URLs discovered and indexed.
- Top Insights/Search Console Recommendations:
Both BWT and GSC new Recommendations provide personalized and actionable suggestions to help webmasters optimize their websites for better search performance. They both highlight key areas for improvement such as content quality, backlinks, crawl status, and overall site performance to identify the best areas to focus your efforts for the greatest impact.
In the ever-evolving world of SEO, both Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console bring a lot to the table. Each platform offers a robust suite of features that help webmasters monitor, analyze, and improve their sites’ visibility and performance. BWT stands out with its user-friendly interface and unique features like IndexNow and Site Explorer, which simplify management while also providing actionable data, making it easy to use and accessible for webmasters of all levels.
Conversely, GSC excels with its granular data, integration with other Google tools, and frequent updates. While its complexity can be overwhelming for some, the depth of information is considerable. Personally, I’ve found that by combining BWT and GSC in your SEO toolkit, you can leverage the strengths of both platforms while gaining a holistic view of URL performance. This dual approach can enable you to identify new opportunities, fine-tune your optimization strategies, and stay on top of your SEO game.
Fabrice Canel
Principal Product Manager
Microsoft - Bing