Trouble with Bing maps and your location?

[DavethePestMan]

Is anyone else having trouble getting Bing Maps to show their business location correctly?
I've registered with Nokia as instructed and they certainly show that my details are stored correctly. However, weeks on and there's still no reference to my company in Bing Maps - the closest they get is to put a pin in the Atlantic, just off the coast of Nigeria, while managing to display my business name and address correctly (in the UK & nowhere near the sea!) in the side panel to the left.

Following the links to correct a location appears to have had no effect at all and I wondered if others were seeing these anomalies and, if so, how you went about correcting them.

If Bing were providing a service that I paid for, I'd simply switch providers - but about 16% of internet search traffic uses Bing these days so I'm kind of obliged to get myself listed despite having nothing but trouble 'working' with them!

Any pointers?

 

[mugatea]

I was listed just off the coast of Africa. I can't remember if I deleted listing on 118 or informed Bing that there was a problem but it is fixed now. I was just on Bing maps there and its a bit of a joke at the moment. I can find my biz if i search for my biz name but if i type in 'dog walkers' it wont show up and only dog walkers with 'dog walkers' in their name will show up. 118 doesn't have a category for dog walkers nor any space for a description, I imagine many businesses are left out when people do a bing map search. A bit of a farce, really.

 

[DavethePestMan]

Thanks mugatea - glad it's not just me!
Thing is, we can't dictate what search tools our potential customers use so we are obliged to try our best getting Bing to return our businesses.
To make matters worse, I tried registering for Bing's version of Ad Words and found the process so farcical I started to lose the will to live!

In my opinion, Microsoft have a long way to go before they can legitimately challenge Google but you and I both know that *all* Microsoft products will come pre-loaded with Bing as the default - so we'll just have to stick with it.

If I find a way of getting this working, I'll be sure to share it in here - however, I feel a fix requires MS to take an interest in our collective plight. If you know a way of doing that....

 

[JonathanSEO]

You can contact Bing pretty easy. I've spoke to representatives before about news inclusion etc. Cant remember the exact page so you will have to Google it

Bing Maps is no good though for businesses, impossible to verify them half the time. Is it even fully rolled out in the UK yet? I thought they were still only doing it in the US.

Does it bring any traffic? Bing is nominal on all my sites.

 

[DavethePestMan]

You can contact Bing pretty easy. I've spoke to representatives before about news inclusion etc. Cant remember the exact page so you will have to Google it

Bing Maps is no good though for businesses, impossible to verify them half the time. Is it even fully rolled out in the UK yet? I thought they were still only doing it in the US.

Does it bring any traffic? Bing is nominal on all my sites.

Thanks Jonathan.
Does it bring traffic? Not a great deal, judging by my..err..Google Analytics - but then it wouldn't because people can't find me very well on Bing!

Catch-22: I'm not getting about 16% of my search traffic from Bing (roughly Bing's market-share of search, apparently) 'cause Bing don't know I'm here - but I don't want to spend the time with them...because I don't see enough traffic!

In all, I'm rather disappointed by Bing to date. Yes, I know they're starting in the US but hold on: that 'launch' was several years ago and this is a major-league company we're talking about who's aiming at the Google marketplace. If I were in their shoes, I certainly wouldn't launch a product that has such global impact (being embedded in all their OS's, etc) without making reasonably sure I was in a position to serve a reasonable portion of that market.

 

[JonathanSEO]

Catch-22: I'm not getting about 16% of my search traffic from Bing (roughly Bing's market-share of search, apparently) 'cause Bing don't know I'm here - but I don't want to spend the time with them...because I don't see enough traffic!

I have a number of sites and Bing brings anywhere between 1% and 6% of overall search traffic across all of them usually somewhere in the middle like 3%. A negligible amount and it brings very little in the way of leads or ecommerce sales. In fact I just looked through about 8 lead gen websites quickly and Bing produced zero.

I'd just focus on Google.

 

[DavethePestMan]

Hmm.. always useful to see real-world data: the stats. that rank search engines probably get skewed by massive businesses that would likely have more influence with Bing, et al.

Thanks - I'll drop Bing for now simply because it's not proving to be worth my time.