Bing Places – Local Business Listings – How To Guide

Nancy McCord is a Bing Ads Accredited Member.
Nancy McCord is a Bing Ads Accredited Member.

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.

Have You Looked at Bing Local?

So many business owners are focused on Google+ Local, (previously called Google Places) that they forget that Bing has a great local program too. In fact, in this recent study consumers chose Bing Local over Google Maps for local searches.

“Bing tied for the top spot with both Superpages and Yellowbook, both of which belong to the Yellow Pages collection of directories. Google Maps wasn’t far behind at fourth and Yellowpages rounded out the top five.” Read the full article. 

Bing has a very nice local portal and like Google has created a page for your business already, you just have to claim it and update it. Just this past month Bing teamed up with Yelp to create even more relevant results for it’s local search engine which will simply improve its future results.

For now, I recommend claiming your Bing Local listing by going to the free Bing Business Portal. The service is free and allows you to add pertinent business information, special promotions and even create a free mobile website. It offers more options and features than the stripped down Google+ Local page now offers.

Bing is also focusing on localized searches in their search engine just like Google. With a small effort on your part, you can grab your Bing Local page and potentially reap some very nice top local placement exposure that can drive desktop and mobile traffic your way.