Startup SEO & CRO Secrets: Why Bing Webmaster Tools is Your Free Growth Accelerator

For solopreneurs, co-founders, and startups, the decision to invest in costly marketing subscriptions can be agonizing. The good news, according to expert David Quaid, is that you do not have to spend a lot of money to succeed in SEO. If you are not running a large agency that requires hundreds of reports monthly, you can achieve incredible value using free resources.

The most critical tool in this strategy is the often-overlooked Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT). While many professionals ignore it due to Bing’s smaller user base, this platform harbors amazing hidden gems and provides “incredible value” that can replace expensive commercial subscriptions. BWT offers instant adoption: you can bypass the lengthy setup process by logging in immediately using your existing Google Search Console (GSC) username, and any domains already verified in your GSC will import instantly. BWT is particularly important for any startup building SaaS products within the Microsoft Azure or Windows ecosystems, as these platforms often see higher clickthrough rates in Bing.

Watch the Podcast with SEO legends Edward Sturm and David Quaid

Here is how three core, free features within BWT can revolutionize your startup’s SEO and Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).

1. Microsoft Clarity: Unlocking User Behavior with the Screen Recorder

For any startup focused on maximizing conversions, understanding how users interact with your website is paramount. Microsoft Clarity, which is available for free through BWT, is a “full enterprise product” that Microsoft acquired and made available to boost adoption of its webmaster tools. Crucially for international and privacy-focused startups, Microsoft Clarity is also GDPR compliant.

Clarity acts as both a heat map and a session recorder. It tracks mouse events as users scan and scroll through your pages, providing direct visual cues about engagement.

• Reading Cues: By tracking mouse movement, you can see if users are scrolling through text “very slowly,” which indicates they are actively reading that section. Conversely, if they scroll “really quickly,” you know the content is boring them.
• CRO Opportunities: If users click on a small snippet of information that is not actually clickable, it signals a strong user intent. This means that users “want information on” that topic, providing a “great opportunity” to expand the content and “extend their stay” on the site.
• The Rage Click Report: This specialized report tracks “rage clicking”—where users repeatedly tap or click a button. This behavior is frequently observed on SaaS sites where client logos are displayed. Users often click these logos expecting to read a case study, and if they are rage clicking a “big brand” logo, they “want to know more”. Clarity is therefore an essential tool for all marketers, web developers, and CRO specialists.

2. The Backlink Monitor: Free Competitive Intelligence

For a startup with limited resources, competitive analysis is often expensive. However, BWT’s Backlink Monitor is considered by some to be the best tool in the platform, and even “superior to the tools that people buy”.

This tool allows you to look up the backlinks for any site in the world, not just your own domain. This gives co-founders a powerful, free avenue for competitive spying, allowing them to instantly see where successful competitors are gaining their authority.

Two features make BWT’s Backlink Monitor particularly valuable:

1. Spam Filtering: Unlike commercial tools such as Semrush, Ahrefs, or Majestic, which might show numerous links lacking value, Bing “automatically reduces anything that’s not spam”. Bing thinks along the same lines as Google, making it effective at removing “a lot of the really really rubbish links”. This means you are seeing only the links that actually matter for authority.
2. Hidden Link Discovery: Some competitors may acquire links from link farms that intentionally “hide their domains” from commercial SEO trackers. These hidden links will often still turn up in Bing’s results, providing a unique data point unavailable in expensive paid tools.

For instance, a search on a site like Screaming Frog revealed 512 pages of backlinks—all available for free. One expert even noted ranking for the competitive keyword “free backlink checker” simply by promoting BWT’s backlink tool.

3. The SEO Scan Tool: Your Free Health Audit

The SEO Scan Tool acts as a robust, free health audit, crucial for ensuring your startup’s site structure is sound. While it may not offer the complexity of commercial tools that cost upwards of $100 per month, the scan tool is highly effective.

It “works 90% of the time” for catching “90% of what most SEOs need”. This is ideal for solopreneurs learning SEO and managing their own website.

The scan helps detect the most common and fundamental issues, such as:

• Broken links and broken pages.
• Pages that are too big.
• Missing or short page titles.
• Broken images.

You can define the scope of the scan (e.g., call it “quick scan November”), provide a website address, sitemap, or specific URL list, and choose to limit the crawl (e.g., to 500 pages). The detailed health report is then conveniently delivered to you via email. This tool is great for “starters” and provides essential functionality before considering migration to a higher-cost subscription.

Conclusion: Authority is the First Base

For startups struggling with indexing—often seeing the GSC error “crawled not indexed”—Bing provides the true, honest answer. While Google attributes this to content quality, the issue is almost always a lack of authority. Bing is transparent, providing an explicit message when a site lacks indexing: “Your site does not have enough inbound links from high quality domains”.

Bing Webmaster Tools provides the insights necessary to address this authority gap through its superior Backlink Monitor and helps optimize user experience through Microsoft Clarity. For startups, utilizing these powerful, free, enterprise-level resources is the essential step toward gaining the necessary authority and optimizing conversions for long-term success.

You do not need to wait six months for results; if your site has topical authority, Google can index pages in seconds. By focusing on gaining quality backlinks (authority) and fixing basic structural issues (Site Scan), you can dramatically accelerate your SEO success.