Bing WT ‘Site Scan’ Audits Sites for Technical SEO Issues

In June of 2020, Bing launched a new website scan tool that scans web resources for technical issues. Updating the Bing Webmaster Service product improves site performance, behavioral factors, and search engine rankings. Read more about the tool, the importance of using it, and the benefits for the site in the article.

What is Bing ‘Site Scan’ Webmasters Tool

‘Site Scan’ is a free Bing tool with features similar to Google Search Console. It allows you to conduct an SEO scan, eliminate technical errors, and get detailed information that will help you improve user experience. Regular checks with the Bing tool help to improve the position of a web resource in the search engine and keep it.

Errors found during audits are ranked by Bing from low to high according to severity. For example, this tool might indicate that you are not using alt tags for images on your site. This is classed as a low-level issue by Site Scan, and should not be ignored if you want to improve the effectiveness of your site’s SEO activities.

The issues found are common to all search engines and affect site rankings for both Bing and Google. Accordingly, the use of the tool will be useful for other search engines as well.

Benefits of Using an Audit Tool

Bing identifies the issues that need to be fixed in the first place to better position your site in search results. In addition to troubleshooting technical issues, this is a good opportunity to improve the user interface of a web resource, increase conversions, and have better sales.

What Website Errors the Tool Helps to Find

The new site audit feature allows you to analyze a web resource in one click. The report will indicate:

1. The number of pages scanned
2. The number of errors that reduce the effectiveness of SEO activities and worsen the experience of using the site
3. Warnings for problems of moderate severity, such as missing meta titles
4. SEO recommendations, or notifications, are short recommendations for improving website optimization
5. Lack of title tags, alt attributes for images
6. Titles and meta descriptions that are too long or too short
7. No H1 tags and so on

How to Use the Tool

To start a site scan, go to the Bing Webmaster Tools section, and click on the new site audit feature.

Is a screen like the below screenshot displayed? Fill out the form on the Bing settings page depending on what you want to check for technical issues.

Bing

Important:

1. The name specified in the form for filling out must be unique and logical.
2. The scope defines the details of the crawl such as website, sitemap, or list of URLs.
3. When choosing to audit a website, the tool will analyze the web resource in a similar way to the Bing bot.
4. When you select Sitemap or URL List, a specific sitemap or list of URLs is scanned.
5. Select Audit Limit. In this box, enter the maximum number of pages required for scanning. The tool allows you to analyze up to 10,000 pages per month.
6. Check the box if you want to be notified of scan updates by email.

Additional webmaster tool settings include:

1. Maximum audit depth: Page analysis can be activated within a specified number of clicks from the start page.
2. URL crawl rate per second: check the number of pages that the tool will analyze.
3. URL parameters to ignore: Tell Bing about URL parameters to ignore to avoid scanning the same pages multiple times.
4. Robots.txt skip can be activated to bypass directives and the ability to parse URLs without restrictions.

Bing recommends that you tune your audit speed carefully. Setting it to high speed can slow down your web resource and affect behavioral factors.

Bing ‘Site Scan’ Tool Report Details

After the site scan is completed, the user can access a report with detailed information about the scan results. The details on the analysis page include:

• Audit status.
• The number of pages scanned.
• The number of errors.
• Quantitative warning.
• Technical problems found and the importance of fixing them.
• The number of affected pages where problems were found.

The problems that the audit tool detects are broken down into three categories. Errors that are flagged as critical by the new Bing tool should be addressed first. They can affect the effectiveness of search engine optimization activities. The notifications received in the report can be considered only after the errors and warnings have been eliminated. This is because they do not affect the site’s ranking in the search results in the same way as errors and warnings.

For detailed information about the problem, click on it. The tool will redirect you to a page with detailed information and solutions to the problem and provide a list of pages affected by this error or warning. You can also look for the Help document by the link.

Bing

Scanning is available in Bing Webmaster Tools completely free of charge. This is an easy way to check a web resource for problems with the Bing search engine and improve the site’s performance. Have you audited your site with Bing yet? Why not try it today?