Learn · How-To
How to Set Up Bing Places for Business
Almost every business with a physical presence has claimed its Google Business Profile. Far fewer have claimed the Bing equivalent, which is a reasonable decision if you think only about search share and a less reasonable one now that Bing feeds a portion of AI assistant answers. Bing Places is free, takes under two hours, and is one of the few remaining places where the competition genuinely has not bothered.
- 1
Check whether a listing already exists
Search for your business on Bing before creating anything. Bing generates unclaimed listings from third-party data, so there is a reasonable chance one already exists with details nobody at your company has ever seen. Claiming an existing listing is better than creating a duplicate.
- 2
Import from Google Business Profile if you can
Bing Places offers an import from Google Business Profile. If your Google listing is accurate and complete, this is the fastest route and keeps the two consistent. If your Google listing is out of date, fix that first — importing errors is not a saving.
- 3
Verify the listing
Verification is by phone, email or post depending on your business type and location. Postal verification takes longer in South Africa than the interface suggests, so start it before you need the listing live rather than after.
- 4
Make your details identical to everywhere else
Name, address and phone number must match your website, your Google profile and your directory listings exactly. Not approximately. The whole value of these profiles to an AI system is corroboration, and corroboration fails on "Street" versus "St".
- 5
Choose categories carefully
Bing uses its own category taxonomy, which does not map one to one onto Google’s. Pick the most specific match available rather than the one that sounds closest to your Google primary category, and add secondaries for genuine additional services.
- 6
Complete every field, including the ones that feel optional
Hours including public holidays, services, payment methods, photos, and a factual description. The reason to complete these is not Bing’s ranking algorithm — it is that specific, structured, corroborated facts are what an assistant can actually use when answering a question about you.
- 7
Connect it to Bing Webmaster Tools
If you have already set up Bing Webmaster Tools, having both the site and the listing verified under the same business gives Bing two corroborating sources. If you have not set up Webmaster Tools, do that too — it is the same afternoon.
- 8
Check how you are described after a fortnight
Ask Copilot and Bing a few questions a customer might ask about your category and location, and see whether you appear and whether the details are right. This is the only verification that matters, and it is also the only one that tells you whether the effort did anything.
Pro tips
- The import from Google Business Profile is the fastest path, but only if your Google listing is already accurate.
- Start postal verification early. It takes longer than the interface implies, particularly outside the major metros.
- Bing matters more than its search share suggests, because of what it feeds. That is the honest argument for doing this, not raw traffic.
Related reading
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