Let’s face it: Most of us don’t like Microsoft. A lot of us
have worked (too hard and thanklessly) for Microsoft, or been laid off by
Microsoft, or been passed over for a job by Microsoft, or had a Microsoft
product crash on us just as we were trying to save some really important data, or just flat-out blame Microsoft for the
fact that the 520 is a parking lot after 3pm.
When Bing launched, it felt like a punchline – was the aging behemoth of Microsoft really going to bumble through an attack of the agile Google, and in the search space? But the more I learn about Bing, the more I see how
Microsoft plans to win this battle in the long run, or at least be
competitive.
Bing Outperforms Google on Crucial Indicators
Let's go through a few stats:
Since the first of the year, the celebrity gossip website I
run has seen an average
of 2.62 page views per visit.
60.75% of the visits this year so far came from search.
Users coming in from search engines averaged 2.74 page views per visit – this
is about 4% above the site average.
If you pull the search engine data apart, some interesting
trends emerge:
Google represents 41.67% of the site’s traffic -- 69% of search engine traffic -- averaging
2.81 pages per visit.
Yahoo represents 0.45% of the site’s traffic -- less than 1% of search traffic -- averaging
2.48 pages per visit.
Bing represents 0.85% of the site’s traffic – 1.4% of search
traffic -- but users coming in from Bing average 3.37 pages per visit. That’s
nearly a 30% improvement on the site’s average, and a 20% improvement over
Google. When you’re running a website that doesn’t sell a product – a website
whose revenue is dependent on advertising sales – page views per visit is your conversion. A 20% bump matters. (Ask.com, although it sends a tiny amount of traffic, comes the closest to Bing's page view benchmark, at 2.95 pages/visit.)
The top ten search terms across the search engines are
comparable, but most of my search traffic comes in from a giant range of
long-tail terms.
I checked the stats of another large website I’ve written
for in the past, just out of curiosity. Since the beginning of the year, Google
searchers have averaged 2.71 pages per visit to that site, while Bing searchers
have averaged 3.06 pages per visit – about a 13% improvement. (Yahoo searchers
average 2.36 pages per visit.)
Bing is outperforming Google, by a significant margin, on a key metric.
Janet Miller of Search Mojo
backed me up on this observation during her talk at SMX Advanced, adding that Bing also consistently outperforms Google in time on site.
Why Does Bing Do Better?
So why does Bing outperform Google and Yahoo so notably in terms of page views per visit? There are plenty factors to consider – the
demographic of the user for each search engine, the relatively tiny sample size
for Bing, indexing of images, UX. Janet Miller points out that the way Bing displays results, using the "Document Preview," is preferable to Google's SERPs.
But there’s also the possibility –
distant as it may seem – that Bing has actually built a better search engine,
one that is more likely than Google to serve users with pages that have value
for them, that better answer the question they had in mind when they typed
their query into the engine. And that would be huge.
I’ll add that I hear anecdotally from my non-techy friends that
they prefer Bing. “It’s just prettier,” I hear again and again. “It looks nicer.” Is it possible that the
ultra-stark, uber-functional UI that Marissa Mayer has championed for ten years
is finally starting to lose its appeal with a generation of searchers taught by
Apple that a UI can be beautiful and
functional? And that it should be?
Bing Attempts to "Demystify" SEO, Starting with Webmaster Tools
On Wednesday, I attended Bing’s session at SMX Advanced called “Bing Webmaster Tools at a Glance” (mostly because it was free). I figure that Bing is, to some extent,
unconquered territory. The average webmaster may have stumbled his way through
creating and submitting a sitemap to Google at some point in the past ten
years, but how many of us have even logged into Bing’s webmaster tools? This is a space where some serious ass can still be kicked by those who take the time to figure it out.
Plus, recent figures indicate that Bing represents 9.43% of
U.S. search traffic at this point – why does it account for only 1.4% of my
search traffic? Clearly there’s room for improvement here. (Perhaps one source of the discrepancy:
Google has 77,660 images from my website indexed; Bing has 80.)
The speaker at the SMX session was Eric Gilmore, the Group
Product Manager for Bing. He’s a Microsoft vet, but only recently moved into
search. “SEO 101 is still really, really hard,” he said. “It’s hard for the big
players, let alone the little guys.” He says the search industry is “ripe for
innovation,” and that Bing’s goal is to demystify the process of SEO to create
user value.
To accomplish this goal, Bing tore down their existing
webmaster tools and is building a new set from scratch. The new tools will
launch this summer, but we got a demo at the SMX session. The home page
delivers time-sensitive messages to the webmaster – crawl errors, etc – and
displays graphs for clicks, impressions, pages indexed, and pages crawled. There’s an “index explorer” that allows a webmaster to spot gaps in Bing’s
indexing of their site, and to also see where they might be “overindexed” – for
example, if expired sales listings are still being indexed. The UX is
straightforward and navigable and the Support button is always visible on the
left side of the screen.
The sense I got from the developers – who got a word
in here and there – was that the app had far deeper and broader capability than
what we’d seen in the quick demo. When I asked whether Bing planned to make a real go at Google Analytics, I was told that they had "nothing to discuss right now ... stay tuned."
The message I took from the presentation was that Bing was
willing to work harder and listen more carefully to their customers to create a
superior search engine experience, and to allow webmasters and SEOs to help
them drive user value. They’re the underdogs here – they’re the startup gunning
for the big player in this space – and they know their behavior as a search
team has to reflect that.
Eric gave us his email address and encouraged us to use it, so I’ll pass it on to
all you to test how genuinely interested he is in user opinion: It’s
Eric.Gilmore@microsoft.com. If you
have suggestions for what you’d like to see in Bing’s webmaster tools – what
could help you do a better job in analyzing your organic search approach for your startup --
drop him a line.