Most site owners set up Google Search Console and stop there, which is understandable given where the traffic comes from. We recently set up Bing Webmaster Tools properly for our own site and found it worth the twenty minutes, not because of the Bing traffic but because it reports a class of problem that Search Console simply does not mention.
The useful detail is that you do not have to start from scratch. Bing offers to import your sites directly from Google Search Console, verification and all. You authorise the connection, pick the properties you want, and they appear already verified with your sitemaps carried across. If you have several sites this turns an afternoon into a coffee break.
If you would rather not connect the two accounts, the usual verification options are all there: an XML file, a meta tag, or a DNS record.
Search Console is very good at telling you what Google did: what it crawled, what it indexed, what it chose not to index and roughly why. What it does not do is critique your pages. It will not tell you that forty pages share a title, and it will not tell you a meta description is too short, because Google’s position is that it often rewrites descriptions anyway.
Bing takes the opposite view and says so plainly. The SEO reports flag things like:
None of that is exotic, and a good SEO plugin will catch some of it. The value is that it is checked across your whole site, by something that is not your own plugin, and presented as a list you can work through.
Three things, and the interesting part is where they turned out to be coming from.
The duplicate title warning was almost entirely our client area rather than our website. Billing systems like WHMCS generate a large number of pages, and by default many of them share a generic title such as the name of the module rather than the name of the page you are on. That was invisible to us because we do not look at our own client area through a crawler’s eyes. It was a large fraction of everything Bing could crawl on the domain.
The short description warning was the same story: the client area produced no meta descriptions at all.
The thin content warning turned out to be the most useful of the three, because it pointed at category archives with almost nothing in them, which is a content problem rather than a technical one and is not something you would ever be told by a tool that only reports crawl status.
It also found one page returning a perfectly valid response that was not the page at all, which no amount of looking at Search Console would have surfaced.
Not everything in it deserves your attention. The keyword research data is thin compared with the paid tools, and the traffic figures will look discouraging next to Google’s if you are used to those. Treat the SEO reports as the reason to be there and the traffic reporting as a bonus.
Be sensible about the recommendations too. “Too little content” on a page that exists to do one job, such as a contact page or a login page, is not a defect. The right response to a report like that is to decide which pages should be competing for search traffic at all, and to tell search engines not to index the ones that should not.
The other thing you get is IndexNow, which lets you notify search engines the moment a page changes rather than waiting to be crawled. Bing and several other search engines support it, and submissions are shared between them. For a shop with changing stock or prices, or a site that publishes regularly, it is a genuine improvement on waiting.
For twenty minutes of setup, yes. Not because Bing will transform your traffic, but because a second opinion on your own site from something that is not the tool that generated the pages is genuinely useful, and because the specific things it complains about are things a customer would also notice.
If you host with us and want a hand working through what a report is telling you, open a ticket.