Howdy Mozzers! You may remember us from our last study, Mission ImposSERPble (we know, that title was way better), but we're not done yet. After we finished with Google, we started in on Bing. Releasing A Tale of Two Studies in October we shook the foundation of my very desk, by jumping up and down like giddy school girls. But it wasn't all jumping and data. Our findings provided us with a terrible truth.
Did you know that every month, roughly 117 million searches are made for the keyword " google" in Bing? Yeah. Scary.
Now for the highlights: Results from the Google study showed that CTR was 18.2% for a No. 1 rank and 10.05% for a No. 2 rank; results from the Bing study showed that CTR was 9.66% for a No. 1 rank and 5.51% for a No. 2 rank.
And so that I wouldn't have to write out all the highlights, and because our last infographic was such a success, we made this awesome infographic!
Have fun.
It's amazing that although Internet Explorer dominates the market they can't help Bing become more of a Brand. It's just a default that people don't know how to change.
AGREED.
If only we all used Chrome/Firefox. *sigh*
As a computer repair company. We have been BEGGING our customers to switch to Chrome/Firefox for the past 5 years. A better web browser is better in so many different ways (SEO/Computer Speed/Less Viruses).
Great work guys, I'm really impressed by the depth of research you've gone into for this comparison as well as your last study. :)
I've been working on a meta-analysis for a site I work with and, looking at their keywords, rankings and resulting traffic, I have no idea how to correlate it with AdWords' keyword tool traffic. I used your findings here, the Optify study you mentioned in your previous post, and a few other studies (and some random numbers I pulled out) to try to find ANY correlation between the numbers AdWords' traffic estimator spits out and the actual traffic we got based on rankings for each term.
Unfortunately, I found pretty much NO correlation between the two with any formula I tried; even removing long-tail traffic numbers and using broad/exact/phrase match data yielded no usable results. Key example: An exact-match query received 3,000 local monthly searches, but traffic from that keyword to the site in question was exactly 7 visits, even at the #1 position.
It could be (admittedly) that AdWords data isn't as solid as some would like it to be (UNSPEAKABLE) but I'm still frustrated that there's close to 0 correllation between AdWords data and actual traffic.
I suppose I question the fact that CTR can be quantified on a broad scale, rather than an individual basis. At any rate, I appreciate the study. :) Keep up the great, scientific SEO work!
We regularly bump into the "inaccurate" traffic estimates in the Adwords keyword tool. It's the top client question when we get a web site ranking top half page one for their keywords and they don't get the traffic they expected. I wonder how much of this relates to all those searches that don't result in any clicks at all?
Mitch, you raise some interesting points. We also find that the AdWords data is not 100% accurate. However, we currently believe that it is the best tool to use for estimating traffic. This tool is used by many marketers, both Organic and Paid, despite the likelihood that the search volumes are inflated.
The results from your correlation study are interesting, disturbing even, but it's important to remember that there are a lot of factors that come into play when doing a correlation study: rank, user intent, seasonality, Broad vs [Exact], content, meta descriptions/rich snippets, universal search presence, etc.
We also agree completely that CTR can not be qualified on a broad scale. Even our CTR is biased towards our sample set of clients, which likely does not include more than 10% of all gloabl industries. For instance, none of our clients sell Batman comics. :( (an issue I would greatly like to resolve). It is our hope that future versions of our CTR study will be categorizable into user intent and industry types: manufacturing, distribution, luxury goods, services, informational, b2b, b2c, etc.
Batmancomicstore.com is still available. Let's make it happen.
Indeed, it's an extremely difficult problem to tackle, and I think you guys have done a fantastic job. Any fault in the conclusion is based purely on the infidelity of the data provided by Google. At best, I saw a .45 correlation in my study, averaged out over 500+ pages of content. Of course, it was full of outliers on both sides, so I don't even trust it that far.
Ah well, good work, anyway. :D
Mitch,
I did *exactly* the same type of analysis you did, with some additions. First, I surveyed all the curves that have been published (the easy part):
https://www.coconutheadphones.com/estimating-organic-search-opportunity-part-i/
...then I used an average curve to take Adwords *broad match* estimates and come up with an estimates for a site with > 50,000 monthly uniques, and then scaled the estimates down so it would work properly. So far it has tested out well against a couple of sites I have tried it on.
I provide a spreadsheet in the second posting for estimating organic opportunity, if you could try it and give me feedback I'd appreciate it. As the posting indicates, I can almost guarantee that for an *individual* keyword any estimate is unreliable, but for large groups of them it appears quite accurate:
https://www.coconutheadphones.com/estimating-organic-search-opportunity-part-2-of-2/
The two big issues I was able to identify with such curves are clicks lost to paid search and "abandoned" searches.
I've since come across paid search curve data in a book by Richard Stokes, the founder of Adgooroo, which is a very similar and *very low* curve for estimating paid search CTRs, I think this is additional weight that for doing opportunity estimates any average organic curve needs to be adjusted way down.
Uh, the meta keywords tag? Really? Is that some kind of Indiana thing? :)
To be fair, in the WB Friday I did with Duane Forrester, he said they do use meta keywords as a spam signal. Maybe that's what they meant? I agree it could be clearer.
We took our information for this infographic from various sources, including this thread over here, https://www.webmasterworld.com/msn_microsoft_search/4328329.htm, (as pointed to by Barry Schwartz) where Duane Forrester wrote, " I'll make this statement: meta keywords is a signal. One of roughly a thousand we analyze. Getting it right is a nice perk for us, but won't rock your world. Abusing meta keywords can hurt you."
Let us know if this has changed.
So... what does that mean exactly? Danny Sullivan seemed to think it meant "that it’s a spam signal, not a ranking signal." And Duane Forrester seemed to agree: "Yeah, you’re pretty much bang on Danny. In fact, it’s not like we’re actively trying to encourage folks to start using the tag. And you’re right – the scenario I describe is more of a spam signal, which ultimately leads to rankings (or not, as the case may be)."
Though in the Whiteboard Friday here a little while ago, Duane said, that using meta keywords "are good things to do, and this is why they're good to do. If you're willing to take the time to get your meta keywords correct, you're paying a lot of attention to details."
To me, these two statements seem slightly contradictory. At first I thought it may be a little good, but ultimately I was swayed toward the "spam signal only" idealogy. But Slingshot SEO seems to think otherwise? Can someone shed some light on this? It's something I'd be interested in knowing others' opinions on.
That's what I wanted to mention here, too. As far as I am concerned I understood Duane's information, that meta keywords do have a negative impact if used "wrong".
hmm. i don't want to hate, but after watching the pro webinar about infographics, i think i can safely say that this is not an infographic. it kinda feels like a graphic just for the sake of being a graphic. i only see 1 unique take on data visualization -- the magnifying glass. everything else could have just been presented without the need for roided out wrestlers :)
For the record, I liked the wrestler idea.
The wrestler idea is great, just saying it shouldn't be called an infographic.
Right. Sorry, I got distracted about your comment about the wrestler idea and totally missed what you actually said. My mistake.
This is interesting because Duane Forrester of Bing has claimed on this very site that Bing has higher conversion rates than Google. I suspect what we are really seeing is a tale of two number crunchers.
When heared it first, I thought that by "higher conversion rates" he meant that the visitors sent by Bing tended to convert better than visitors from Google, not that they had better click-through rates for their SERPs.
Did I get it right or wrong?
Doh! I think you're right... Or... maybe I'm just not sure of anything anymore.... :)
But I suppose it could be possible that on average fewer Bing searches result in clicks to pages but that more of those clicks result in conversions... I bet it would be hard to confirm either way though.
I remeber seeing a study that showed users spent less time on Bing and went to second apge less often, indicating they found results faster
I suggest you take a look at oline123 comment here.
I somehow have the same feeling about the data.
yes dumb people who use default browsers and second tier search engines are generally more suceptible to landing pages. fools and thier money are soon parted.
Enron style CTR accounting.
That's interesting to see that Google achieves only a little over 1 click out of 2 searches.
Google still have lot of work to do untill it always return the perfect set of websites for the requested query.
That's even more interesting (or scary) to see that Bing gets just over 1 click out of 4 searches, it looks like their algo has a lot of room for improvement.
My thoughts, exactly, and that spawns deeper (or shallower) questions...where are these non-clickers going? Page 2 of the SERPs? Initiating a new search? To another search engine? To the phone book? Giving up? That's an awful lot of peple not acting on the results.
With local results being more and more present, if they lookup for something like "miami pizza" they might simply look at the closest location and go to it without further research.
I also see the possibility that people might directly find the answer to their request in the text snippet (if they search for something like "eiffel tower height"), in pictures (if they want to know how something look) or something SEOs doesn't always think of, sponsored results (aka adwords/adsense)
But your right, that's still almost 1 search out of 2 that doesn't "convert" and it would be interesting to know more details about the other scenarios possible for searches that doesn't end up in a click.
P.S. It might sound funny but I sometime use Google to check my spelling, I do a search for the word and see if Google suggest me an other spelling.
I'm confused; if the Bing searchers aren't clicking on any of the results, then what are they doing? Conducting another search? Going to Google? Or just not searching altogether? I'm thinking it's that they're conducting another search but it'd be awesome if there was any hard evidence of this.
Also - I know 177,000,000 searches for Google on Bing might seem like a lot, but it's only about 3% of Bing's entire # of monthly searches (2.9% to be exact). Also, is there any data of an increase/decrease in this number for the last few months? It'd be nice to see if more & more people are growing unhappy or happy with Bing's results, resulting in a jump or drop in the # of searches for Google.
Great study Slingshot!
Yes, I don't understand the numbers here either. Why are Bing's CTR numbers about half of Google's numbers? Are all those people going to the second or later pages? Seems unlikely. Clarification?
Hi team,
It seems that the significantly lower Bing CTRs highlight the psychological difference between users of the respective search engines.
These numbers indicate that Bing users are much more likely to click on the sponsored (paid) listings. Together with Bing claiming that conversion rates are much higher than Google, one could hypothesise that Bing users are more likely to be "buyers", as opposed to Google users who are more likely to be "researchers".
Hope this clarifies the confusion.
I thought age of domain was a ranking factor so thanks for that info :) great infographics. Bing still seems to be so small here in the UK - I hope it continues to grow!
I agree with that for us Bing and Yahoo combined in the UK are only 3% of traffic, it's all Google for us and this shows no signs of changing.
This also seems to debunk the rather odd comments above that people "don't know how to change over from IE" - people are obviously electing to change in the UK to use Google.
Thanks slingshot SEO for sharing this awesome infographic with us. I agree to the fact that , the no. of visitors to the Bing are worth to think about and consider them as potential visitors . additionally, i would like to draw the attention towards the WB Friday of Rand with Duane Forrester: He said that the probablity of conversions of the visitors into potential buyers through bing search engines is much high compared to that of other search engines. The meta part is also much considerable as SPAM signal and In my point of view Bing is Co-operating A lot with the webmasters, and that makes me think more about Bing.
Interesting infographic. One thing I'm not comfortable with is H1 heading tag being listed as a non-ranking factor for Google. I have seen quite a few case studies where just changing the H1 tag has boosted the SERP significantly. It is amusing to see the number of searches for "Google" in Bing. Thanks for sharing the infographic! :)
Good Infographic but i would like to disagree on one point -
Header Tags do play an important role as far as rankings are concerned in Google.com.
In fact we have case studies that suggest that for Bing more than the header tag, keywords in Bold tag perform better.
Again one should note that this is not the case for HTML 5. In case of HTML 5 <b> denotes something in the content you want to bring attention to which is again a whole different concept.
- Sajeet
Cool infograhpic, but Age of domain not been a ranking Factor I wouldnt agree with that one. If you have a authority site which has been indexed for 10 years vs. a site which is 1 month old search engines will naturally favour it. sure age of domain if not been indexed or purchased via a domain seller you can loose authority but if you have a domain which has been indexed for 10 years it will work well I have tested this numerous times vs new domains.
James,
Did you take into account the backlink profile of your aged domain vs. new domain? With aged domain likely comes historical/aged backlinks.
If you compared your 10 yr old domain with no backlinks (ever) to a 1 month old with no backlinks, the results might be interesting. Have you done this type of comparison?
-BMB
I have compared domains with indexed age and highly similar backlink profiles on numerous occasions. In some cases the new domains have backlink which are in fact higher quality than the old domain.
The literal age of a domain is not a factor. If you have two domains, equal in all other characteristics, and one of them is older by 6 months or even ten years, that domain will not perform better than it's younger counter-part. As many others have said, the strength of old domains is often correlative, not causative. The older a domain is, the more likely it has had time to generate content, garner links and attention, and has been crawled and indexed for a significantly longer period of time. The fact that it's been registered longer is not the cause.
Hi,
Like I have said I have tested this many times with indexed domains for lenthgy periods of time 15 years down to - 2 years, I am highly involved with domain portfolios, I actually class myself a "domainer" own around 200+ domains in different TLD's, I know people who own 10,000+.
I am aso referring to "indexed age of the domain" - i.e the time the domain has been indexed in search engines and the authority it has picked up, also if the domain has dropped or not (if you read my original post) not the time the domain has been registered.
This is why when people say "oh the age of the domain is not a facor" you should define further between the "indexed" age and the "date registered" you can have a domain which is registered 10 years and never been indexed.
But every one is open to their own thoughts on this matter, and own opinion, you can find out what works via your own testing and own methods.
Kind Regards,
James Norquay.
I have to chime in here, too... since when I read "Age of Domain" as ranking "NO" in both search engines my initial reaction was "Ohh, BS..." as I see plenty of occasions where a crummy old domain with little to no content changes in years is still ranking far better than I feel they deserve to! (though after 3 yrs solid work developing content, link authority, etc. my sites are finally starting to beat these for tons of queries)
To me, "Age of Domain" must mean "indexed age of domain" otherwise what's the point? If it is only the registered age, and in no cases does any search engine give registered age any credence, then it isn't much of a ranking factor, is it?
- Fred
In my opinion in Google Domain Age is still a ranking factor... but it’s now less important but saying that it’s no more a ranking factor won’t be justified.
Over all a great work on infographics, i am still thinking why more women use Bing then Google :p... but on a serious note really impressive work guys!
I have trouble believing the validity of any test results that suggest that nearly 75% of Bing users don't click on first page results. Bing doesn't have enough fundamental differences from Google search results to suggest that there would be a 50% drop in page 1 CTR from Google to Bing.
Could you go into more detail about how the test was conducted? I couldn't find that information in the post.
A link to the study is above the graphic and is also available here: https://www.slingshotseo.com/resources/white-papers/google-ctr-study/
I know that there is the whole right-brained / left-brained thing going on, but could it be that women use Bing more because it is prettier, while google is more plain and guys use it for that reason?
I wonder what the Google and Bing scientists do when they read posts like this..
These are some interesting stats provided! Thanks!
Wow it's amazing to see someone actually daring to say the click through rate for position 1 on Google is only 18.2% - I mean we've all know it was someone low like that but for years people have been trying to argue it's much higher. Whenever I work out my estimates I always work on a 1 in 5 model - I'll reduce that further now to make my estimates more concervative.
Great blog!
I'm adding here a data, on how many people are using Bing to arrive to my site from Italy: 1,42% .
I really hope Bing will increase because it will be nice to see differences and to play around to optimize the site for both google and bing.
Nice infographic by the way, thanks for sharing!
I'm a little bit confused with the Ranking Factors.
We get most visitors to our website from Google.
I know Infographics are meant to aid the communication/understanding process. But I am not sure that is the case. I find myself working really hard to tease out the key facts.
But interesting study.
Well' Amazing statistical explanation i have gone through this week..
It's more interesting about the gender gap in bing's CTR.. Lolzz...
This is interesting a we have carried out similar comparison tests and our results are similar but favour Google higher. When we look at sites with 300 to 400 unique visitors a day for example we can see on average over a month that 83% of the people come from a Google search. The only thing I would add is that different sectors work better with Bing than others and we are carrying tests in other sectors and waiting for the results to finish.
Some really good information, it's also interesting to see a lot of the community having similar issues with getting high rankings for terms that look 'big', then receiving next to no clicks. Frustrating!
Still, really, really good post with epic info - and Infographics are awesome! :)
If I could just say that in the end no one knows what the true ranking factors are. Also I can guarnetee most people who have commented on this post have done zero research of their own to find out what these ranking factors may be. At least Slingslot have attmpted to do some research and were kind enough to share that research with us.They should be commendted for a well thought out post. well done.
Kind Regards Kevin Gallagher.
I think the CTR data for both search engines is much lower than average. It may be due to Slingshot client base and how they are writing their title and description tags.
The CTR's for paid search positions are even lower than organic. If they aren't clicking the first organic position, what are they doing?
I'd love to see how they conducted studies to determine the ranking factors for Google and Bing. Or it is just their opinion? For example how do you know membership in Bing Webmaster tools effects rankings?
responsemine, I had a big problem with the claim that membership in Bing WT affects rankings too. I'd really like to see the documentation of where they said that. It just doesn't make sense to me.
In my opinion, it's likely a correlation vs. causation thing, where it may seem like membership helps rankings since if you're a member, you're likely to have updated sitemaps that help Bing crawl your site more efficiently, etc... and that would impact rankings.
"But the biggest question I have is "Why do you want us to do this? What is wrong with the old code?"Using the old code, it does not produce a perfect unique titles-direct to the point which has some disadvantages with regards to SEO and user experience , and if this concerns you, then the article has some tips in working with this type of problem.
Pretty cool stats. But i'm not convinced about Google not using the H1 tag as a ranking factors, from benchmarks i ran, it seems like the H1 tag has an impact.
Cheers
Interspersing figures, especially about Google delivering 97% of all mobile searches, I'd thought Bing would have a nice percentage too.
Emphasises the need to use Google and Bing Local, Adwords + Social Media Optimisation alongside with SEO to pick up good level of visits.
Great post! The gender break down is particularly suprising!
This certainly confirms my experiences that Google is much more likely to bring me what I am looking for that Bing on the first search.
Excelent, excelent work guys!!
Wow, great work and data here.
Excellent infographics! Google average CTR (from 1st to 10th position) is 99.23% more than Bing (2.62% average CTR).
According to Wikipedia Bing and Yahoo hold market share of 3.91% and 6.42% respectively (evaluation method based on queries searched - Though its not mentioned but I think that is the universal criterion to evaluate search engine market share). Please point out if I misunderstood or misread something.
Now you're just showing off, this infographic is amazing! Not to mention the ranking factor comparisons. Who knew Bing was still using keyword meta tags.. Hmm...
Nice intel!
Very Interesting Infographic Evan :)
I also think as James said above, domain age is a ranking factor which google still incorporates in SERP & I too had many times seen that.
One other thing is that Google also favors Exact Domain, which is something they should abort. I don't know about Bing but yes there are many things they should incorporate to make their Algo better.
One thing I defintiely have noticed is that my Conversion Rate is much higher in bing than Google. But the amount of traffic coming from Goolge vs Bing/Yahoo is abuout 70/30. I cant complain with Bing's low CPC either!
Wait wait so your telling us that a large portion of the population still uses internet explorer? Do they also have aol emails and dial up connections. Ha just kidding we were however talking about it yesterday at work. Sorry but if you work in a tech company and you use IE people will laugh at you. Overall I don't think Bing is a horrible search engine however they just don't deliver results like Google and Google has changed its algorithm multiple times in a number of years...how many times has Bing changed it I wonder? Over all in time they will most likely fail I don't think Google is apt to lose on the search wars unless FB threatens them in some way which is always possible because obviously FB wants a good portion of the internet traffic thus increasing their own revenue, but unless some of us here are really well paid egineers working at these companies we can only know what the companies tell us sadly.
To add to the revelations of this post, in one senior-specific vertical for us with comparable search engine rankings, Bing/Yahoo organic traffic is driving 52% of visits compared to Google's 37%.
How to reconcile the results reported here with those of others that found that 81% of Bing/Yahoo users click on organic SERPS, while only 65% of Google users do?
@deepsand You must take in consideration that these stats are based on over 600 non-branded keywords. If my understanding is right, this mean it exclude queries like "youtube", "facebook", "twitter", etc.
It's a well known fact that a lot of people prefer to type in the name of the website they want to see in google instead of typing the address in the address bar.
These queries must be a good chunk of searches and must make a difference in the number of organic result click through rate.
But, without your sources, we can't do any further research on what explains the difference between the results reported here with those of others.
Nevertheless, the OP allows that "The results may not generalize to other populations."
Given that the sample population consists of clients, it very well may not be representative of the universe of users.
In re. other studies, there have been several. A quick search for a recent report finds the Information Week article at https://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/microsoft_news/231400134 re. Experian Hitwise findings.
I think bing needs to block searches for "Google"............isn't it?
It's very interesting the fact that Bing user demographics are 58% for womans and 42% for mens. Maybe it's because there are most womans using Internet Explorer within Bing searcher as a default homepage.
Thanks :)
While the actual data in the article is great to present, I'm disappointed in the table of ranking factors. You've made a number of factual errors. I go into more detail about it in a blog post here: https://raleighgirlsrants.blogspot.com/2011/12/misinformation-runs-rampant.html. I really would encourage you to be more responsible in what you are reporting as fact.
jennyhalasz,
I read your blog post, and while it was written and composed well none of your points have supporting data. Your quote from Duane Forrester was followed by an explantion of how we should understand his statement according your interpretation of it. Also, you said this:
Incomplete: Age of domain is not a direct ranking factor; this is true. However, older domains tend to have more established link values and penetration. Older domains typically rank better because of their superior link profiles, which is indirectly related to the age of their domain.
You are assuming that ALL domains continue to gather links and increase their link profile as time goes on. This simply is not true. Not to mention the fact that the creators of the infographic made a point to separate link diversity and domain age as factors. The point they are trying to make is that the age of a domain, on it's own, does not contribute to rankings.
I'll agree with your point about "Page Rank." That was a bit misleading and could have been better represented. Thank you for pointing that out.
The rest of your points do not offer any data to support your positions. I'd love to see where you are getting your data/facts. Cheers!
Accoberson,
Good points. Sometimes I get to writing and forget to cite my sources. I'll update my post with more details. :)
evanfish,
Please understand that I am not trying to call out Slingshot SEO per se - in fact in my post I stated that I've always known your agency to be a good one. I'm concerned with misinformation that seems to grow legs of its own and run away with the industry. Just trying to tell it like it is. If the infographic is opinion, I think it's important to state that up front.
I've updated the post. While I was able to find specific sources for many of my claims, I realized that the bulk of my frustation with this article was the lack of sources it offered. So I guess in that way, I am no better. ;-)
Hi Jenny, our purpose in creating this infographic was for the benfit of the community, and is strictly our opinion based on the results of our research, statements from Google and Bing representatives, and observations based on our own client work. We're grateful that you've made the post with your opinions, we're always eager to learn and see new data on ranking factors.
I would also like to personally apologize for any mis-understanding that may have occured from this infographic. It certainly is not my intent to lie, deceive, or mis-represent this industry or Slingshot SEO in any way
I don't think you need to apologize Evan - you guys did a good job. One suggestion for the future might be to have A) sources listed for all the factors you say are confirmed/not confirmed and B) use "probably" or "probably not" instead of "yes" and "no."
Still, I think it's a good research project and a solid infographic (and Jenny, I don't think anyone's proven it, but Bing's the only one who's publicly had a rep say specifically to use the H1; Google hasn't to my knowledge, and the correlation data suggests it's more about the headline than the actual <h1> tag format).
Random Question but are you and Even Fiskin related Rand?
Brothers... Rand being the older.
And Evan is a crack and still quite young and will learn the "diplomacy of posting". Great job guys with this post and the previous ones :D
Good Infographic Really its a mind blowing post.....