Bing Places for service area businesses: should you bother?

If you travel to customers, Bing Places is worth about an hour once. It is Microsoft's free business listing, the Bing equivalent of a Google Business Profile, and a service area business can list the areas it covers instead of publishing a street address. It will not match Google's reach for local searches in Australia, but it costs nothing and it feeds Bing Maps and Bing results. Here is how we would set it up, and where our own experience stops.

What Bing Places is, and what it is not

Bing Places holds your business name, phone number, website, hours, categories and either an address or a service area. It shows in Bing search and Bing Maps. It is separate from Bing Webmaster Tools, which is about your website being crawled. People often confuse the two. Our guide to setting up Bing Webmaster Tools covers the website side. This post covers the listing side.

Be realistic about size. Most Australians searching for a plumber or an electrician use Google and its map pack. We wrote about that in Google Business Profile and the local map pack. Bing Places is the second listing to do, not the first.

Why a service area business should still do it

There are three reasons, and only the first is certain.

1. Bing users exist, and a correct listing beats a missing or wrong one.
2. Other directories and apps pull from Microsoft's data. A wrong phone number can end up in several places.
3. Reports say ChatGPT search uses Bing results. We have not verified that listing data is part of that, so we treat it as a possible benefit, not a reason.

Setting it up

1. Sign in at bingplaces.com with a Microsoft account.
2. Import from Google Business Profile if you have one. This is the quickest route. Then check every field. Do not assume the import is right.
3. Choose the service area option instead of showing a street address if you work from home or from a van. Enter the suburbs, cities or regions you cover. Keep the list to the places you will genuinely travel to. Our post on ranking for trades you don't offer is about a related mistake, claiming more than you do.
4. Pick categories that match what you do. One or two main ones beat a long list.
5. Verify. Bing may ask for a phone, email or postcard check, or may accept the import without one. Allow time for this.

The part that matters most: keeping details identical

The name, phone number and website should read the same on Bing Places, your Google Business Profile, your website footer and your structured data. Search engines match businesses by comparing these. Small differences such as "Pty Ltd" in one place and not another, or a mobile number in one and a landline in another, make it harder for them to treat the listings as one business.

Here is what we do on our own sites. We declare the business once in the site's structured data and read every other place from that single source. The reasoning is in local business schema, declare your business once. Then we compare the live listings against it by eye: name, phone, website address, hours and areas. A mismatch is a ten minute fix. A mismatch nobody noticed can sit for years.

One honest limit: we have set up far fewer Bing Places listings than Google Business Profiles, and we have not measured calls or leads from Bing Maps for any business. Treat this as a tidy-up task with a small and unmeasured upside.

What to expect after you submit

Changes to a listing are not always instant. Bing may review edits before they show, and a new listing can take days to appear in search or on the map. If nothing has shown after a week or two, sign back in and check whether the listing is waiting on verification, not just waiting on time. Search for your business name in Bing from a logged-out browser, then search for your trade plus a suburb you cover, and note what you see. Write the date down. That gives you a baseline, because without one you will not be able to tell later whether anything changed.

Photos, a short description and your opening hours are all optional in the sense that Bing will accept the listing without them. They are also the fields a customer sees first, so fill them in. Use real photos of your work, your vehicle or your team. Our post on AI generated photos on a business website explains why we avoid invented images where a customer is judging whether you are real.

Reviews

Bing Places can show reviews gathered from other sources, and it has its own review feature. Do not spend effort building a second pile of reviews there. Put your effort into getting genuine Google reviews, as described in getting Google reviews without being weird about it, and check what Bing displays for your business now and then.

Mistakes to avoid

• Listing a home address publicly when you do not want customers turning up there. Use the service area option.
• Listing a service area far wider than you cover, to look bigger.
• Letting the hours drift from Google's.
• Adding a tracking phone number on one listing only.
• Never checking back. Listings can be edited by others and suggestions can be accepted automatically.

Where this fits

A listing helps people find you, but they still land on your website. If that page is slow or unclear, the listing was wasted. Our SEO service covers the local setup alongside the site itself, our pricing page shows what is included, and get started is the place to ask about your own business.

Related: how to get your business recommended by ChatGPT and other AI answers and IndexNow explained.