Impact Local Search with the New Bing Business Portal

Microsoft set out to change the way users interact with search engines when they released Bing over two years ago. Now as Bing continues to grow its market share, the company has greatly overhauled their local search platform. The brand new Bing Business Portal is a fresh take on the company's previous clunky interface that is packed full of exciting new features to help local business grow online.

This new portal is geared toward providing the business with all the necessary signals that all the Search Engines are interested in. This new portal should be optimized along with Google Places, Facebook Places, Yahoo Local, and other geospecific services.

Local search optimization is a thriving topic for small business owners. No longer does your business just need a website to compete. Companies that have a "brick and mortar" or physical location need to be aware of how the major search engines view both their website and their location. You can get started with the Bing Business Portal by searching for your listing. Creating a listing for your business is an easy process that begins with verification. Verify ownership of the business listing by phone or if that option is not available, Bing will send a PIN through postal mall.

The Bing Business Portal is full of features including the ability to add not only logos and photos, but detailed features and unique information about your business. Bing allows the business owners and marketing agents to customize the listings by adding links to Facebook and Twitter pages. All of the information added is designed to increase the relevancy for Bing as it matches your listing with the users.

Bing is also aware of the growing number of mobile phone users that are accustomed to looking for local businesses while on the go. Similar to the Bing application for smartphones, this new Business Portal will create a mobile website for your business. A unique feature of the Bing Business Portal is the ability to create deals and coupons along with QR codes to aid in offline promotion. These deals can be customized with unique categories of discount coupons, rebates, and will be seen on the mobile Bing site (m.bing.com). Business owners even have the ability to publish deals directly to their Facebook pages. Restaurants and bars can create custom mobile menus, upload PDFs, and link to existing online menus.

Business owners will be able to pick and choose from all the publishing options in the preview section of the portal. Check out your Bing listings, your mobile website, and any additional features before releasing them to the world. Bing notes that some of the content may be reviewed prior to publishing, but doesn't say if that review will be by human or machine.

It will be interesting to see how much support Bing is able to provide their small business owners. A common complaint from users of Google Places is lack of help available to owners. As part of the BETA, the new Bing Business Portal incorporates comic book styled help for individual sections of the process. This is likely to help differentiate Bing from the more text heavy help sections of Google, while still providing the answers. Only time will tell if business owners and the search traffic will flock to this new portal, but it's certainly a sign that Bing will continue to evolve in hopes of becoming the preferred search option for users.

MEET THE AUTHOR

Kevin Doory, Online Strategist

Kevin became part of the team at Groove Commerce in September of 2010. He brings years of hands-on experience with search engine optimization and pay-per-click marketing for both in-house and agency capacities. Kevin garnered a wide range of experience in managing clients, streamlining processes, and developing analytics-driven strategies while helping to build search departments from the ground up in multiple industries.

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Thomas Ieracitano