Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.

By Sasha Pasulka

Let’s face it: Most of us don’t like Microsoft. A lot of ushave worked (too hard and thanklessly) for Microsoft, or been laid off byMicrosoft, or been passed over for a job by Microsoft, or had a Microsoftproduct crash on us just as we were trying to save some really important data, or just flat-out blame Microsoft for thefact 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 howMicrosoft plans to win this battle in the long run, or at least becompetitive. 
Bing Outperforms Google on Crucial Indicators
Let’s go through a few stats:

Since the first of the year, the celebrity gossip website Irun has seen an averageof 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 – thisis about 4% above the site average.

If you pull the search engine data apart, some interestingtrends emerge:

Google represents 41.67% of the site’s traffic —  69% of search engine traffic — averaging2.81 pages per visit.

Yahoo represents 0.45% of the site’s traffic —  less than 1% of search traffic — averaging2.48 pages per visit.

Bing represents 0.85% of the site’s traffic – 1.4% of searchtraffic — but users coming in from Bing average 3.37 pages per visit. That’snearly a 30% improvement on the site’s average, and a 20% improvement overGoogle. When you’re running a website that doesn’t sell a product – a websitewhose 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 arecomparable, but most of my search traffic comes in from a giant range oflong-tail terms.

I checked the stats of another large website I’ve writtenfor in the past, just out of curiosity. Since the beginning of the year, Googlesearchers have averaged 2.71 pages per visit to that site, while Bing searchershave averaged 3.06 pages per visit – about a 13% improvement. (Yahoo searchersaverage 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 – thedemographic of the user for each search engine, the relatively tiny sample sizefor 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 valuefor them, that better answer the question they had in mind when they typedtheir query into the engine. And that would be huge.
I’ll add that I hear anecdotally from my non-techy friends thatthey prefer Bing. “It’s just prettier,” I hear again and again. “It looks nicer.” Is it possible that theultra-stark, uber-functional UI that Marissa Mayer has championed for ten yearsis finally starting to lose its appeal with a generation of searchers taught byApple that a UI can be beautiful andfunctional? 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 throughcreating and submitting a sitemap to Google at some point in the past tenyears, 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% ofU.S. search traffic at this point – why does it account for only 1.4% of mysearch 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 GroupProduct Manager for Bing. He’s a Microsoft vet, but only recently moved intosearch. “SEO 101 is still really, really hard,” he said. “It’s hard for the bigplayers, let alone the little guys.” He says the search industry is “ripe forinnovation,” and that Bing’s goal is to demystify the process of SEO to createuser value.

To accomplish this goal, Bing tore down their existingwebmaster tools and is building a new set from scratch. The new tools willlaunch this summer, but we got a demo at the SMX session. The home pagedelivers time-sensitive messages to the webmaster – crawl errors, etc – anddisplays graphs for clicks, impressions, pages indexed, and pages crawled. There’s an “index explorer” that allows a webmaster to spot gaps in Bing’sindexing of their site, and to also see where they might be “overindexed” – forexample, if expired sales listings are still being indexed. The UX isstraightforward and navigable and the Support button is always visible on theleft side of the screen. 
The sense I got from the developers – who got a wordin here and there – was that the app had far deeper and broader capability thanwhat 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 waswilling to work harder and listen more carefully to their customers to create asuperior search engine experience, and to allow webmasters and SEOs to helpthem drive user value. They’re the underdogs here – they’re the startup gunningfor the big player in this space – and they know their behavior as a searchteam has to reflect that. 
Eric gave us his email address and encouraged us to use it, so I’ll pass it on toall you to test how genuinely interested he is in user opinion: It’s Eric.Gilmore@microsoft.com. If youhave suggestions for what you’d like to see in Bing’s webmaster tools – whatcould help you do a better job in analyzing your organic search approach for your startup –drop him a line.

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