Google, Yahoo & Bing

Is there anyone who hasn’t heard of Google? The vast majority of searchers turn to Google. Indeed, Google defines searching to the degree that some people say they “googled” something as a synonym for searching.
Despite its dominance, Google’s not alone in the search world. Its chief rivals are Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Bing even has a few people saying they “Bing It” rather than “Google It.”

Searching is one of the most popular activities on the internet. Search engines have become an essential part of everyone’s lives. Here at Search Engine Land, we cover search engines not just from the search marketing perspective but also for search consumers. How can you search better? What cool new search tools are out there? What weird, wacky and wonderful things have emerged from the world of search? Read on to learn more on how Search Engine Land keeps you up-to-date on all the news and developments.

Eye-Tracking Study: Everybody Looks At Organic Listings, But Most Ignore Paid Ads On Right

Interesting new data about searcher behavior from a recent User Centric eye-tracking study: Whether using Google or Bing, all 24 participants looked at the organic search results for their queries, but between 70% and 80% ignored the paid ads on the right side of the page.

User Centric studied the search behavior of 24 “experienced users” of both Google and Bing, all between 18 and 54 years old. They were asked to do eight searches — four on Google (with Google Instant turned off) and the other four on Bing.

User Centric says there’s no significant statistical difference between the 28% of searchers who looked at Google’s right-side ads and the 21% who looked in the same place on Bing (as shown in row three above). Ads that appear above the organic results were viewed substantially more often than those in the right column and almost as often as the organic search results.

Some Fundamentals of Search Engine Success

1. Keyword Ranking

Obviously, this is the number one metric, but one that can get confused easily when tools are not used (i.e. keyword database research). Failure to get the right data has a lot of businesses thinking all keyword phrases are equal if they represent their service and if their site gets ranked. THIS IS A BIG MISTAKE ! Some keywords have 10x the search traffic as others. And, some low traffic search terms are actually more relevant to a business than those with higher search volume.

That said, knowing which terms to get ranked and how valuable they are to you, in a general sense, is the a major part of the scorecard.

2. Conversion & Content Utilization Tracking

Make sure to identify multiple conversion types, including sales, leads, subscriptions, downloads, event sign-ups, etc.

Tracking on multiple levels tells you what your visitors are actually finding of value and how to better interact with them on an ongoing basis.

3. Organic Search Traffic

• Overall Organic Traffic Growth – Focus on year-over-year comparisons.
• Growth of Traffic for Targeted Keywords – This is a double check against rankings. Look at month-over-month and year-over-year growth in traffic for specific target keywords.
• Percentage Of Overall Traffic Coming From Organic – Track the trend, but be careful of peaks and valleys based on key marketing tactics such as email marketing blasts (which will obviously lower the percentage of traffic generated by organic search for that time period).
• Progress With Specific Engines – It may be a Google-centric search world, but also track progress with Yahoo/Bing, and others that may be important to your business.

4. Referrals From Links & Website Properties

Link building and content generation is not just about improving keyword rankings/keyword traffic. When done well, links, and websites you develop to support that effort, will bring traffic to the site. Take credit for that traffic, and for any conversions produced through those referrals.

5. Visitor Engagement

Warning: these metrics may not appear to be “in your favor” as you create content and increase Keyword Diversity. It’s a simple fact that your success will also bring less-relevant traffic, along with the good stuff.

• Organic Bounce Rates
• Repeat Visitors
• Pageviews Per Visit
• Time Spent On Site

6. Inbound Link Count

You’ll probably have to report on this whether you want to or not. And, not all links pointing to your site will be due to your SEO efforts. In addition, reporting on the quantity of links can seem silly to the seasoned SEO, who understands that it’s about quality, trust, anchor text, relevancy, etc. That said, keep track of the progress in acquiring links, and consider using something like SEOmoz’s Linkscape to create a quality-links report.

7. Increase In Branded Searches

While SEO cannot possibly take all of the credit for an increase in people searching for your company’s brand and product line brands, it is also true that some credit has to be given to SEO for people coming to the site after searching for the brand name. Be careful here though, because it is clear that other media channels can have a much greater influence on this metric. It’s easier to attribute some of the branded searches to SEO when there is less emphasis at the company on mass media and extensive PR (e.g. companies with lower advertising/marketing budgets).

8. Pages Indexed

As you increase the crawlability of your site, and add new content, you should see the number of pages that are indexed increase. This metric can be especially important to companies with product catalogs or large quantities of technical documentation that have previously been inaccessible to search engines.