A lot is happening on the search scene with the boiling competition between Google and Microsoft’s new search engine – Bing. Bing has been live for better than half a year and the results of Microsoft’s efforts are proving to be extremely fruitful for local businesses.
For a long time Google has been preaching it’s strive to “return relevant results” to searchers and for the most part, compared to past search engines, it has delivered on that promise. Where Google has fallen short is in the realm of local search. Google “maps” and “local business results” were to be a search miracle for small, local business, but proved to be one of the company’s biggest embarrassments with the ease in which the local business results can be “spammed”. Since Bing was launched, Microsoft has delivered on its promise of more relevant results and has demonstrated the superior ability for small businesses to be found locally on the Internet and that ability is resulting in more conversions from a search engine with a smaller market share.
In my 6 months of testing Bing and Google side by side the results are much different than I expected. Using our company website, www.mymarketingcompany.com, and its many interior pages, I created a comprehensive list of the keywords used in the company pages and with the help of a tool from SEO Book called “Rank Checker”, I was able to compare the indexing and search results ranking of my company’s web pages side by side between the three major players in the search arena.
The overall goal in website development is to have the pages of the website indexed by the search engines for the keywords they are optimized for, and to have those pages rank well in search results of searches using those keywords. If a search engine delivers on its stated goal, to deliver the most relevant search results for keyword search queries and your web pages are relevant to that search query, they will be displayed in the search results. The more relevant the information on the page, the higher it will rank.
Well, in theory anyway but unfortunately for Google results, this has not been the case.
So who is doing a better job? Google supporters will be quick to bang the gong for Google and Microsoft supporters will be quick to cheer for Bing as you would expect, but the proof is in the results and the results of my study were quite interesting to say the least. Due to the disparity in the search results I need to separate them into two categories, local search and national search.
Local search is defined as any search query that a searcher will expect a result for a business located in his/her metro area. For example: Searching for landscaping company.
National search is defined as any search query that a searcher will not expect a result in any geographical location. For example: Searching for deals on airline tickets.
Local Search
For most small business in America this is the search category they are most concerned with as is our company. I optimize our company web pages for the service and geographical location we wish to provide a particular service in. Within those locations I have competitors so I would expect to see their web pages along side mine in search results.
What I used for my criteria as a means to “grade” a search engines ability to return relevant results was its ability to filter irrelevant web pages that contain the words that are used in the search query but the context of the web page is blatantly irrelevant to the intended search context. A search for “Sarasota Billboard Advertising” (which is only one of the 55 search terms used in the study) should display relevant results for companies that provide billboard advertising in the Sarasota area.
It would seem to be a simple exercise, right? Well the results will amaze you.
Let’s start with the 600 pound gorilla – Google. With 70 percent of searches being performed on Google, and as long as they have been providing Internet search services, you would expect them to be the master of search. Unfortunately the study proved otherwise. Google’s local results were, to put it bluntly, surprisingly pathetic. So pathetic in fact that our page dedicated to copywriting ranked number two in the search results of “Sarasota billboard advertising”. On the copywriting page the only instance of the keywords “billboard advertising” was a link to the billboard advertising page. There was no other mention of the word “billboard” anywhere in the title, description, headers, or anywhere else on the page yet it ranked number two. Our web page on billboard advertising, which is loaded with variants of the keywords “billboard advertising” as well as “billboard advertising” being occurring in the URL extension, ranked 59. Our web page on billboard advertising also has more external one-way links to it than our copywriting page and backlinks are supposedly how Google measures the “importance” of a webpage.
Our competition did not rank any better, the number one billboard vendor did not even rank in Google, but their AdWords ad did… Seems rather easy to optimize a small add for correct keyword placement so then why does Google have such a hard time with a webpage?? I also found it highly peculiar that the website for the national media company, CBS, whom is the owner of the billboards in our area, was nowhere to be found in search results unless you performed the search inside quotation marks.
There are only 8 “local” companies providing billboard advertising in our community yet only 3 out of the top 11 search results were company web pages developed specifically for promoting billboard advertising services of some kind and I am stretching credit being given. Two were for mobile billboard ads, and one was for an aerial tow-behind-a-biplane banner company. The rest were just pages that contained the search keywords but not necessarily the context you would expect in a search for billboard advertising.
When you look at the data collected in the study, you are left to make an assumption as to the reason the most relevant pages of keyword search terms are being buried so far in search results. The study suggests this burial of relevancy is a means for Google to force the owners of the most relevant pages to either pony up and pay the “ransom” for an AdWords campaign or not be seen in search results. Of all the web pages we randomly examined, only 10 percent of those pages actually ranked in a position that would have a good chance of being seen, well, appeared within the first 3 pages of search results. This was not only endemic to our company pages, but also the pages of our competitors and other product and service providers.
Bing results were miles more impressive and much more relevant to the search query. Five of the top 10 search results were links to company pages intended to promote billboard advertising services in Sarasota, the remaining 4 out 5 were secondary links by online advertising services pointing to the same landing pages of the companies in Sarasota providing billboard advertising services.
Of our 55 keyword terms used in the study, we found Microsoft’s Bing to consistently display more relevant local business search results for a search query than Google. Google only indexed the correct page for the correct keyword term 27% of the time compared to correct indexing by Bing 76% of the time.
Accurate indexing of local content equals relevant and accurate results for search queries. It would appear that Bing’s indexing relevancy for local content is 3 times more accurate than Google’s.
National search relevancy
For national search terms we used 40 keywords and found there to be no major difference in overall search relevancy. For example the word “oyster” returned the results we expected for a single keyword. The results were quite evenly spread out among the most popular uses of the word oyster. From the edible bi-valve, to Oyster yachts, to Oyster hotels, the results were nearly identical.
However for our study Google performed slightly better in our relevancy standards of indexing and returning pages where content matched the keyword context 73 percent of the time compared to Bing’s 69 percent.
In Summary
Though it is not as obvious in highly competitive search terms, It has become extremely apparent Google is monetizing local search to its benefit. Relevancy on a local level seems to be second seat to selling pay per click ads. Google clearly has a better ability to match context relevancy to its search results than it is currently providing but instead has tweaked the algorithms to bury a large percentage of relevant pages so far in the search results that many local business owners must opt of an AdWords ad to be seen by consumers interested in their services. When you add that to the SEO circus Google has turned the Internet into, it is hard to maintain that warm and fuzzy feeling Google once provided its users. This writer firmly believes the game is rigged at the expense of local small business owners who can not afford an expensive AdWords campaign.
Google maps may have helped some businesses but with the ease of ability to spam the local map results it can not be deemed reliable in terms of relevancy or very reassuring that you are actually finding a local business rather than a referral service. The more “reviews” and the higher your “ratings” the higher you will place in the local search map. It really is as easy as getting all your friends to write a review for your business and you will be at the top of the list. I am sure many of you have heard of the locksmith referral examples that have swept the media, it was a referral service that had spammed the results and the same service was coming up in multiple metro areas nationwide and often had 20+ listings in each city.
Obviously Google and Matt Cutts’ war against spam has proved to be a complete joke when it comes to local search. They have done more to hurt the small local business owner than any large Internet company has ever done in the past by allowing the abuse to continue and remain in their search results. At one point in time the Internet held significant promise for affordable local business advertising only to be taken away by typical corporate greed. Google AdWords has gone from an opt-in form of advertising on the internet if you wanted more traffic, to nearly a required one if you want any traffic at all.
What is particularly perplexing is the fact that Google is aware of the problem with local search yet they do nothing to remedy the situation. It seems this further supports the monetization theory. If Google created something that was too good at returning relevant results to service and product seekers, the vendors of those products and services would have no reason to participate in an AdWords campaign.
An interesting side note; Microsoft physically mailed a letter to my company for us to confirm our location and business “existence” by sending us a pin number to verify our listing within Bing’s webmaster tools. Obviously Microsoft is determined to deliver a more relevant local search result and spam free user experience to the users of the new Bing search engine. Though I have never been a big fan of Microsoft or it’s products due largely to its “bully” mentality while Gates was in control, it would seem the “new” Microsoft is seriously working on its image and starting to produce the products computing consumers expect with its introduction of Bing, Windows 7, their push to a more standards compliant web browser, as well as working with the W3c in development of the next web standards.
Since July, my business has received roughly 80 percent of its Internet leads from a search engine that only occupies 10 percent of all searches conducted on the Internet.
And best of all, all those leads from Bing were free.
Be thankful Bing is replacing Yahoo. Perhaps then many of us local business owners will no longer be held for ransom as we are now and we will actually be able to be found on the Internet more readily. That is of course, until Microsoft follows Google’s lead…