Ask ten agency clients which search engine they care about and ten will say Google. Ask where their best-converting desktop traffic comes from and a couple will be surprised to learn that a meaningful slice of it never touched Google. Bing is the default on every Windows machine, sits behind Edge, powers Yahoo and DuckDuckGo results, and dominates corporate environments where IT locked the browser settings years ago. That is a real audience, and most agencies are not reporting on it.
This guide covers why clients ignore Bing, which accounts benefit from tracking it, how to fold Bing data into a monthly report that clients read, and how to price the work so it pays for itself.
Why clients only ask about Google
Clients ask about Google because every SEO conversation they have ever had was framed around it. The vocabulary, the tools they see demoed, the case studies they read: all Google. The absence of Bing in reports is self-reinforcing. If the monthly deck has only Google positions, the client assumes Bing is either irrelevant or already covered.
There is also a visibility problem. Google Search Console is the one SEO tool most marketing managers have logged into; Bing Webmaster Tools is often not even verified on the client’s domain. The consequence is an inherited blind spot. You can rank first on Google for a term and sit on page three on Bing, and the client will never know because nobody looked. For accounts where Bing represents 5 to 15 percent of organic traffic, that is material pipeline left to chance.
Which client types benefit most from Bing tracking
A direct-to-consumer brand selling to mobile-first shoppers under 30 can keep Bing as a footnote. Other accounts should have it front and center.
B2B and enterprise buyers
B2B research happens at work, on a work laptop, during business hours. A large share of those laptops run Windows with Edge as the managed default, and in locked-down corporate and public-sector networks the search engine is set by group policy. Procurement teams, IT buyers, and operations managers are disproportionately likely to be on Bing without ever choosing it. If you run SEO for a SaaS company, an industrial supplier, or anyone selling into healthcare systems, universities, or government, the Bing share of qualified traffic is usually higher than overall market share suggests.
Older demographics
Users who bought a Windows PC, kept the defaults, and never installed another browser skew older. For clients in retirement planning, healthcare services, insurance, and travel aimed at people over 50, Bing traffic often converts as well as or better than Google traffic.
US desktop traffic
Bing’s share is strongest on US desktop. If desktop sessions drive higher order value or longer sales cycles for a client, Bing is part of that story whether or not it is in the report yet.
Local service businesses
Plumbers, law firms, dental practices, HVAC companies. Their customers often search from a home PC, and Bing’s local results and Places listings are a separate ecosystem from Google Business Profile. A local client that has never claimed their Bing Places listing is competing with one hand tied, and the rank data will show it.
How to introduce Bing into an existing report
The mistake is adding a Bing section without context. The client sees unfamiliar numbers and asks why the report got longer. Introduce Bing in three steps instead.
- Quantify the audience first. Pull a 90-day organic traffic breakdown by search engine from the client’s analytics. Show Bing sessions, conversions, and revenue next to Google’s. If Bing is 8 percent of organic conversions, that number goes on slide one.
- Verify Bing Webmaster Tools. Get the property verified and import the site from Google Search Console if the client has not done so. This gives you impressions, clicks, crawl data, and index coverage to pair with position data.
- Add a Bing position table alongside Google. Same keyword set, two columns. The side-by-side view is what makes the gap visible. A term ranking 2 on Google and 14 on Bing is a conversation starter that a standalone Bing table never is.
For the ranking data itself, use a dedicated tool rather than spot-checking by hand. Manual checks are personalized, location-skewed, and impossible to repeat consistently across 30 client accounts. A purpose-built bing rank tracking tool that runs weekly checks and returns verified results gives you a defensible number you can put in front of a client and stand behind the following month when it changes.
A monthly Bing reporting template
Keep it to one section of the main deck. The goal is to make Bing a normal part of the conversation, not a separate deliverable.
1. Bing traffic and conversion summary
Sessions, conversions, conversion rate, and assisted revenue from Bing organic for the month, with month-over-month and year-over-year comparison. Include Bing’s share of total organic. Two sentences of commentary.
2. Position overview
Average position across the tracked keyword set, count of keywords in the top 3, top 10, and top 20, and the net movement since last month. Present the same metrics for Google in adjacent columns so the client can compare at a glance.
3. Biggest movers
Five keywords that gained the most and five that lost the most on Bing. For each, one line on the likely cause: a new page, a lost backlink, a competitor launch, a SERP layout change.
4. Competitor snapshot
For the priority keywords, where do the client’s main competitors rank on Bing? A table with the client and up to five competitors is enough to show whether the client is winning, holding, or falling behind on this engine specifically.
5. Bing Webmaster Tools health
Crawl errors, index coverage, and URL inspection issues. This keeps the client aware that Bing has its own crawler with its own opinions.
6. Actions for next month
Three bullets. What you are going to do about the losses, what you are going to push on the gains, and any Bing-specific opportunities such as claiming a Places listing or submitting a sitemap through IndexNow.
Multi-market clients: tracking Bing across 24 countries
Bing’s presence varies sharply by country: strongest in the United States, meaningful in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and parts of Western Europe, negligible in some Asian markets. For international clients, Bing tracking has to be country-specific or it is misleading.
A rank tracker that covers 24 countries lets you build a single keyword set per client and then segment positions by market. The practical workflow: track the same 50 core terms in each of the client’s priority countries, then report the top three or four markets where Bing share is material. Do not report all 24 unless the client actually sells in all 24. A US-headquartered manufacturer with distributors in Germany, the UK, and Canada needs four columns, not twenty-four.
Country-level tracking also surfaces localization problems Google data hides. If the German pages rank well on Google.de but poorly on Bing in Germany, the cause is usually something Bing weights more heavily: hreflang, local backlinks, or on-page language signals.
Competitor benchmarking on Bing
Most of the client’s competitors are also ignoring Bing, which means the field is less crowded and wins come faster. Tracking up to five competitors on the same keyword set gives you three useful outputs.
- Share of voice. Across the tracked terms, what percentage of top-10 positions does each domain hold on Bing? If the client holds 30 percent and the nearest competitor holds 12, that is a defensible moat worth naming in the report.
- Gap keywords. Terms where a competitor ranks in the top 5 on Bing and the client is outside the top 20. These are the priority targets because the competitor has already proven the term is winnable on this engine.
- Engine divergence. Cases where a competitor outranks the client on Bing but not on Google. This pattern usually points to a specific factor such as exact-match domains, older site age, or stronger on-page keyword usage, and it tells you what to fix.
Explaining volatility to clients
Clients used to Google’s relatively smooth day-to-day behavior can be alarmed by Bing swings. The explanation has three parts.
First, Bing’s index refreshes on a different cadence, and it does not run the same volume of continuous algorithm adjustments that Google does. Position changes on Bing tend to arrive in steps rather than gradual drift. A keyword can sit at position 6 for three weeks and then move to 3 or 11 in a single update.
Second, lower query volume on some terms means thinner ranking signals, so small changes in click behavior or links can move a page several spots.
Third, measurement noise is real. Unverified or personalized checks can show phantom movement that is not actually happening. This is why weekly verified checks are the right cadence for Bing: frequent enough to catch genuine shifts, spaced enough to smooth out day-level noise, and consistent enough that the trend line means something. When the report shows a weekly series rather than a single monthly snapshot, the client can see whether a drop is a blip or a trend before anyone panics.
Set expectations in the first report: describe Bing movement as step-wise, promise to flag anything that persists for two consecutive weekly checks, and commit to not reacting to single-week moves.
Pricing Bing tracking as a service
There are three workable models, and the right one depends on how your agency already packages SEO.
Bundled into the retainer
The simplest option. Bing tracking becomes a standard line item in the retainer alongside Google tracking, and you raise the fee modestly to cover tool cost plus an hour or two of analyst time per account per month. This works best when most of your accounts fit the B2B, enterprise, or local profile.
Add-on module
For a mixed client base, offer Bing tracking as a named add-on with its own fee. The pitch: here is your Bing revenue, here is what we are not seeing, here is the monthly cost to fix that.
Tiered by keyword volume and markets
For larger accounts, price by scope. A tier for up to 50 keywords in one country, a tier for 200 keywords in up to four countries, and a custom tier for enterprise. Tool costs scale with keyword count, so your pricing should too. Because the free tier of tools like the tracker from Broken Link Checker covers 10 keywords, you can pilot Bing tracking on a small account at essentially no cost before committing to a paid plan, which makes the add-on easy to trial with hesitant clients.
Whichever model you pick, tie the fee to a visible outcome. When a client can see that Bing produced 40 qualified leads last quarter and the tracking service costs a fraction of one deal, the pricing conversation is over.
Making it stick
Start with the accounts where the audience is obvious. Pull the traffic split, show the client the revenue they already get from Bing, and put a position table next to the Google one. Once a client has seen a Bing keyword move from 15 to 4 and watched the leads follow, they will never ask why it is in the report again.
