Slingshot SEO: A study on CTRs of Google and Bing results
Slingshot SEO is a search engine optimization company that serves as a consultant for clients to increase traffic on their websites. The company employs a set of strategies to increase the standing of a website in a query of search results using Google, Bing, Yahoo! or any major search engine. Their main selling point is that they can provide “unparalleled results” in Internet marketing by tailoring clients’ websites to increase their PageRank and thus their position on major search engine sites. As search engines are the first place people look for products and services, increasing a company’s position among search results can greatly improve the sales and profit of the company. Slingshot SEO claims that they can increase traffic to a website by 466% and one can imagine that this would have quite profound effects on the popularity and revenue of a product or service. Because Google and Bing make up 95% of all searches on the Internet, a number one ranking for a search on these sites has the ability to drive in all sorts of business.
Recently Slingshot SEO released a white paper that utilizes the data collected from their clients to compare the efficiency of Google to Bing by examining the click-through-rates for the top ten positions in their search queries or otherwise known as page one results. In the study, Slingshot describes the CTR as the percentage of users who click on a given result after entering a search term, very similar to what we learned in class. This percentage includes people who searched for a topic, yet did not click on any results. Slingshot investigated a variety of 108 common search terms and averaged the CTRs for each of these search terms. What resulted was not surprising. Google elicits a higher CTR that Bing for each of the top ten positions. See the figure below.
Google returns web pages that are effectively almost twice as good as the web sites Bing returns. For the top three positions, 34.47% of Google’s users click on a desired link while only 17.92% of Bing’s users find a result worth clicking on. Google’s first link returns a higher CTR than Bing’s top three combined. Note that using percentages removes the fact that vastly more people use Google as their primary search engine rather than Bing. One can compare the search engines to each other as long as they want, but can’t argue with the fact that having a top ranking position on these search engines almost guarantees a highly trafficked web site and having a lower ranked position drastically decreases the amount of people visiting the domain.
The article also brought up an interesting result from the study. They found that 117 million searches are made every month for “google” in Bing and only 55 million searches are made for “google” in Google. To further exacerbate it, only 4 million searches are made for “bing” in Google.
The white paper
A Tale of Two Studies: Establishing Google & Bing Click-Through Rates
http://www.slingshotseo.com/resources/white-papers/google-ctr-study/#main
Articles about the white paper
Google CTR study: top three positions deliver 35% of traffic
http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/8146-google-ctr-study-top-three-positions-deliver-35-of-traffic
Bing Top Position Gets 9.66% CTR, Lower Total Page 1 CTR than Google [Study]
This is just a fantastic comparison between Google and Bing results. The Click Through Rate (CTR) is an important prospect of a blog’s success and it is associated with the blog post’s title and description that we write.
Title and description should be written like we are going to advertise that blog post on search engines and around the globe. It should be spicy, crispy and eye catchy that people couldn’t stop to click on it when it is shared on social networks.