First of all, we’re assuming you’ve already set up Bing Webmaster Tools and it’s already accumulated enough information about your content. If you are just starting out, the Keyword Research feature won’t display too much information.
To get started, go ahead to this URL https://www.bing.com/webmasters/keywordresearch or select it from the left menu if in the interim the interface has changed.
The interface is clean, almost to a fault. Bing gives us one large search field, three filters and a simple results table showing keywords, trends and impressions. That makes the tool approachable for beginners, but several important details are unnecessarily vague.
The three dropdowns all display “All,” without immediately telling us whether they control country, language or device, while “3 M” would be much clearer as an exact date range.
The results table could also do more. The tiny trend charts show direction, but not the size of the change, and the impressions column needs a visible explanation of exactly what Bing is counting. I would like to see percentage changes, stronger sorting and filtering, clearer export controls, intent labels and the ability to save keywords into lists. The simplicity is welcome, but at the moment it still feels better suited to a quick check than to serious keyword research at scale.
However, when you actually insert a specific keyword you want to track, that changes. You can pick the country, region, language and duration up to 24 months.
You can also simply click on a specific KWD that was already suggested to you and then the next dashboard will appear.
The main overview shows the total number of impressions for the selected period, accompanied by a larger trend chart. This allows us to see whether interest is stable, increasing, declining or driven by a temporary spike. Alongside it, the global breakdown shows where the demand is coming from, which can be especially useful when deciding whether a topic should be approached globally or adapted for specific markets.
I like that Bing displays the exact reporting dates instead of giving us only a vague monthly estimate. However, the connection between the filters, total impressions and global breakdown could be explained more clearly. It should be immediately obvious whether the main number represents the selected country or global demand, and whether changing one filter also changes every other section on the screen.
Below the overview, Bing lets us switch between three types of suggestions:
- Related keywords expand the original topic and help us find alternative wording or adjacent searches.
- Question keywords show the questions people are asking around the subject, making them useful for how-to sections, FAQs and potential standalone guides.
- Newly discovered keywords surface more recent searches that may not yet have a long history.
This is probably the most useful part of the entire tool. Each keyword is accompanied by its impressions and a small trend chart, while the full dataset can be downloaded for further analysis.
Still, the interface could go further. I would like to select and save keywords directly inside Bing Webmaster Tools, compare several phrases on the same chart and filter the list by intent, growth or minimum impressions. At the moment, Bing helps us discover the keywords but leaves most of the organization to a spreadsheet.
Bing also shows the pages currently ranking
At the bottom of the report, Bing displays the top ten URLs ranking for the researched keyword. This is important because keyword research should never stop at search volume. Before creating anything, we need to understand what type of result Bing already considers relevant.
The section provides a quick view of the ranking titles, URLs and any topics Bing has associated with them. It can help us determine whether the results favor guides, product pages, reference material, news coverage or another type of content.
The idea is excellent, but the presentation needs work. The results are not visibly numbered, long titles and URLs become cramped, and the Topics column often provides too little information to be genuinely useful. Bing could improve this considerably by displaying the ranking position, domain, content type, publication date and important SERP features in a cleaner layout.
Overall, these screens contain much more useful data than the minimal interface initially suggests. Bing already has the foundations of a very capable free keyword research tool. It mainly needs clearer labels, better comparison features and a stronger way of turning discovered keywords into an organized research project.
Mini SERP Analyzer
I guess the Top 10 url ranking on this keyword feature is some sort of a “poor” SERP Analyzer, but I like it how it helps you stopping from opening yet another page.
Something else that was bugging me was the occasional error when you actually work within the dashboard too much, so I hope they improve that in the next version.
So, to summarize, to make the best of the Keyword Research feature in Bing Webmaster Tools, these are the steps:
- Open Keyword Research in Bing Webmaster Tools.
- Enter a seed keyword that describes the topic, product or problem you want to investigate.
- Set the correct country or region, language, device and date range before interpreting the data.
- Review the keyword’s demand and trend over time.
- Inspect Related keywords, Question keywords and Newly discovered searches.
- Study the Top URLs to understand what type of page Bing currently rewards.
- Cross-check the opportunity against your own queries in Search Performance.
- Choose a target page based on intent, relevance and realistic ranking potential, not volume alone.
We are looking forward for Microsoft to update the product with even more features, but for now I’d say it’s a very good free keyword research tool you shouldn’t ignore.
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