Both Google and Bing offer an area or “Tools” section for webmasters to monitor their site is performance in each of the respective search engines. The value in webmaster tools lies within the available data, and how you go about using it to make smarter decisions moving forward.
This chart is a high level comparison of what types of data you can expect to find as a webmaster in each search engine. This will greatly assist you when trying to understand what features you can leverage from the various Webmaster data sources. Below are some key takeaways from the comparison chart:
Search Queries
Google enhanced their Search Queries section in webmaster tools a few months back. Within this section you can log in and see what search queries your site is showing up in search results for, how many clicks you are getting for queries, what your click through rate is and even what your average rank is for that query.
Bing has also announced the release of new features including a search queries section but they are not showing your average position for each query, only your impressions, clicks and click through rates.
Links
Google provides you with a sample list of external pages that link to your site.
Bing has not yet included a links section; it will be interesting to see if Bing starts to incorporate some of Yahoo’s link data.
Geographic Target
From an International SEO standpoint, Google has given webmasters the ability to target a given URL to a specific country, which helps rankings in geographic specific data centers like www.Google.fr. Google also has a page speed area which actually offers suggestions on how to improve your site’s speed.
Comparison Synopsis
Google is supplying extremely beneficial data to webmasters and their tools section is starting to give the kind of data that will help webmasters and SEOs alike make great decisions for improving their site’s performance. The data we are now seeing is moving closer to Pay Per Click data, which is imperative to calculating the ROI of your campaigns. Bing, on the other hand, is a bit behind. Bing seems to be modeling their webmaster section after Google and I hope to see them continue to deepen the level of data we are seeing in the near future.
