About a month ago Bing released an updated business portal for its local listing – no doubt that they figured out they needed to make drastic changes to keep up with Google. Overall, the update made drastic changes to the previously lacking local listing platform. However, many people including myself experienced a downfall to the upgrade – previously claimed listings were no longer in accounts. I tried contacting Bing to see what I could do, but have yet to hear back.

Much like Google, Bing now offers you the option to claim your business by phone which speeds up the process – the mail verification process is still available as well. A few other additions to the platform is a cleaner design that is much more user friendly.  Bing also added in deals that you can easy create and add to any of your claimed listings all at once. In addition to this Bing also gives you the option to play around with how your local listing will appear both on desktops and mobile phones.

All in all the upgrades Bing has made should drastically help them out in the local area – in the past Bing Local was one of those listing options that you wouldn’t pay too much attention to (mainly because you couldn’t do much with it), but now they have definitely thrown their hat in the ring to enter the game with the big boys like Google and Yelp. It will be cool to see where Bing takes the portal to next. With any luck these updates will light a fire under Google and get them to pay more attention to catering to the needs of their users like Bing has obviously done.