While we’re confident in our data analysis, we’re left to speculate as to why Bing brings better value.

Microsoft Bing

#3 – Top Display Area – In Bing, paid results for some search queries are stacked 4 deep at the top of the page, vs. 0-3 deep on most Google AdWords display pages. It would be very interesting to see Bing’s SERP heat maps illustrating what percentage of visitors actually make it past these first four rows of paid ads to get to organic results.

#2 – Simpler Interface – Google has always had a lot of irons in the fire. Now, however, its myriad ambitions and partners are crowding its search engine results pages. Paid text ads are now competing for call to actions for both unrelated and related items in Google Shopping, related categories in Google Books, Google News, related search items and even social media results. This means that paid ads are increasingly crowded out of the equation. While Bing is hardly focused solely on organic and paid search results, its display is still far simpler, increasing the chances that a user will click on text ads.

#1 – Less Competition – Perhaps because of Bing’s smaller market share, there are typically 20-30% fewer paid search competitors on each SERP compared to Google. Less competition nearly always equates to higher conversion rates in paid search. Time will tell whether the conversion needle will move as Bing’s merger with Yahoo is completed later this year. It’s a no-brainer that many existing Yahoo advertisers will be folded into the Bing model, bringing a much larger market share along with increased competition. With luck, Bing will keep its SERPS stripped down and reasonably free of clutter.

In late 2009, DemandResults began using Bing for legal industry paid search ads. Once our team got past the Bing/MSN Ad Center’s archaic user interface, we were able to focus on results that were, initially, so much higher than Google’s that we thought it might be a fluke.

We increased our spend, and in a matter of weeks were able to confidentially identify Bing as the best value for lead generation in that particular industry.

In early 2010, we began using Bing as part of an overall paid search strategy in several healthcare-related verticals. After several months of combined PPC testing in these verticals, we know that while we can still get more leads through Google AdWords due to its sheer size, we get proportionally far more conversions from Bing than you could reasonably expect given its current market share (12.1%, according to ComCast’s May figures). In addition, cost-per-conversion levels in Bing have been substantially lower than Google: 24% for the legal industry, and 85% in healthcare.

Keep in mind that these are true apples-to-apples tests, running the same ads, keywords, landing pages and geo-targeted settings in Google and Bing campaigns. Conversions were tracked both via form submissions and call tracking. The results are lopsided enough that we are executing an all we can eat strategy in Bing, whereas we’re actively limiting our spend in Google.
While we like the outcomes, we’re still left to speculate as to exactly why Bing delivers better results. We’ll ponder these findings and blog about that next time.

This is a particularly important question to social media marketers because customers are increasingly turning to social media channels for customer support as much as for interaction. On a daily basis we witness our clients’ customers reaching out to Facebook, Twitter and blog comment areas to offer new product ideas, propose business partnerships, and yes, air grievances when traditional customer support channels aren’t responsive enough.

Heads should explode when customers post things in Facebook like “I see you here every day but you still haven’t fixed my software,” yet these posts go unattended for hours, days and weeks. I think this happens for two primary reasons:

-There’s nobody home. Companies buy into creating a presence on social channels, but still don’t fully understand how much of the communities they build shape their public image.

-There’s somebody home, but they don’t feel that dealing with customers within their job description. Marketers don’t view customer service as core to their job, and they don’t bother contacting someone in the company who is.

What we need to realize is that customers view social channels as fully integrated entities – a direct line to the company’s major decision makers. To some, this may be just a cute delusion. But it shouldn’t be. It should be a wake-up call that companies need to spend less time in traditional channels and look at social as more than just another place to issue press releases.

In short, they’re great for social search because they make your tweets much more visible in social search than they might be otherwise, and may draw quality followers who are interested in the broad topics you tweet about.

But there’s also a downside. As Google revealed in early 2010, the search giant has deemed hashtags a red flag for spam, and consider it a negative ranking factor. This means that if you use hashtags, your tweets are much less likely to show up in Google’s real-time search results. Until now, I’ve clung to hashtags because (a) I believed Google’s assertion that hashtags were spammy was ludicrous, and might soon be overturned, and (b) I also believed that the benefits of being more visible in Twitter outweighed search visibility. Now with Google’s real-time search in full swing, however, traditional search’s reach can no longer be ignored. I’m going cold turkey.

Here’s how to compensate for a hashtag-free existence:

•Keyword-Centric Profile – Take care to make your profile keyword-rich, including broad topics that you hope to be found for within social search. In other words, if you tweet about the housing market, include “real estate” in the description of yourself.

•Keyword-Centric Headlines – Like any good SEO copywriter, utilize broad keywords within your headline. This may mean that certain keywords get utilized over and over again in your headlines, but that’s an acceptable tradeoff to not being found.

•Consider Custom-Shortened URLs – If you have high-value keywords in your domain name that you feel may help people find your tweets in traditional search, consider utilizing a custom URL shortener from a service like Awe.sm that allows your primary URL to be recognizable.

The answer to the first question is easy – in the short term, it will affect your search ranking very little. On his personal blog, Google’s Matt Cutts has been very clear about site speed’s impact on search rankings, saying that “fewer than 1% of search queries will change as a result of incorporating site speed into our ranking.” Far more important are page content relevance, site reputation and other high-impact search factors. But just because it’s a low priority item now, doesn’t mean it will be low down the road.

Should you choose to measure your site’s speed, we recommend doing so on a per-page basis using a free tool such as Google’s page speed tool . If your site score seems low (70s-80s), take heart. Here are index page speeds from some of the world’s most popular Web sites according to Google’s page speed tool.

• CNN.com – 67/100
• Salesforce.com – 76/100
• WebProNews – 77/100
• Espn.com – 82/100
• Facebook.com – 85/100
• YouTube.com – 85/100

The answer to the second question really depends what where you are in your overall SEO program. Since site speed is actually measurable, it’s an attractive item to tackle and improve upon. However, you should only do so if you’ve already covered many more of the high-impact SEO items.

There are also plenty of non-SEO-related reasons to improve site speed. It seems clear that Web users like faster Web experiences. A faster experience may increase the likability of your Web site, and in some small way, encourage more Web conversions. Also, remember that
If you choose to tackle Web speed, commonly needed areas of improvement involve combining external Javascript, minimizing DNS lookups and specifying page image dimensions.

If you didn’t see Matt Cutt’s video blog on the matter back in February, now might be a good time to revisit it:

For years, search marketers have been utilizing search data trends to make predictions that help calculate the probability that certain marketing messages might connect with audiences. As one small example, you have no doubt noticed an increase in Fortune 500 companies using the term “Cloud Computing” as of late. Although this term is still somewhat esoteric to some, search strategists began noticing a sharp upward trend among certain geographic regions – notably in parts of India and the San Francisco Bay Area – back in 2008.

“In the cloud,” domineers began snapping up cloud-based domain names, and search strategists began optimizing Web properties for related terms. Suddenly, as journalists began decoding the term for small business audiences, it became nearly common vernacular.

Now there is a second measuring stick that may prove to be nearly as useful to business: Social Search. While there aren’t currently any widely available tools that accurately measure social search (but there are plenty that look promising), HP Labs analyzed nearly 3 million Twitter updates that mentioned 24-major releases over a three-month period. The researchers factored in the date of a movie’s release and the number of theatres where it opened, predicting ticket sales with 97.3% accuracy. By measuring sentiment (e.g. customer reviews), they predicted the following weekend’s returns with 94% accuracy.

As an example, the researchers predicted that the new film Dear John would earn $30.71 million on the first weekend ( actual: $30.46 million). For the film The Crazies, the firm predicted $16.8 million (actual: $16.07 million).

We’re following up with the researchers to find out more about how they sorted the data (presumably from the Twitter API) and what common tools they used, if any, to make their measurements. Social search has come a long way in the past 9 months, bolstered by Twitter and Facebook deals with Bing and Google), greatly enhancing our insight into social network sentiment and chatter. Free services such as SocialMention offer a hint of what may be available in the future to help marketers prophesize which concepts will resonate with consumers.

After six years, Facebook is still gathering influence. The company estimated earlier this year that out of its 400 million users, 175 million log into Facebook every day. Many users enthusiastically interact with brands and artists in Facebook as well as other Fans of those communities. Remember that all of this is indexable content, and everything you do in this realm can play heavily into your future SEO strategy. The increased emphasis on fresh content in search may also play a heavy role in search ranking.

Here are the three most important building blocks to consider right now:

Regular and Relevant Content Updates – your Facebook posts will be contextualized though image tags, keywords used on your Page, your page title and other relevant content. The more focused your posts are topically, the more likely they are to help your overall SEO strategy.

Jump-Start Fan Growth – there are many reasons to want to create a critical mass of Facebook Fans (commerce potential, for one). But knowing that Google search is increasingly personalized, increasing your social network in Facebook may prove to be incredibly important down the line. Already, Google’s social search serves up content that your friends logged into Google social products have published or interacted with, much in the way that Facebook’s post quality now partially determines the “Top News” in your Facebook news feed. It’s completely conceivable that the same effect may start happening with Facebook Pages in Google down the line.

Facebook Connect – start looking for ways to introduce Facebook connect to other social and non-social Web properties you operate (blogs, Web sites, community areas). It’s unknown how this might affect your overall search ranking over time, but it’s a good idea in general to begin weaving your Facebook presence into your other properties.

Microsoft Bing's official logo

Bing’s increased market share means increased opportunities for paid search advertisers as the company continues to take users from competitor and future partner, Yahoo. Thus far, DemandResults’ early forays into Bing PPC advertising have been fruitful in terms of conversion rates, although the advertising administrative interface lacks the flexibility of Google AdWords and is at least a generation behind.

There is still no evidence that Bing is taking market share from Google. That could change quickly if rumors that would make Bing the default search engine on the iPhone and other Apple products materialize.

Back in November, just before the Dreamforce conference, DemandResults launched our answer to that fundamental question – SEO for Salesforce, a highly configurable Salesforce.com app that enables companies to track which organic keywords convert to leads, opportunities and sales. Since then, we’ve been diligently working on the SEO for Salesforce 2.0 edition, which will feature turnkey reports, dashboards, automated tools that check your site for high-impact optimization techniques, and much more. Look for a release sometime in Q3.

Our dev team appreciated the shout-out from Salesforce yesterday when Customer Success Manager Kirti Patel featured SEO for Salesforce in his whitepaper “5 Proven Ways to Generate More Leads.”

“Look for apps that will enhance your SEM efforts. For example, the free edition of the app SEO for Salesforce automatically connects to intelligence data through Google Analytics. Use this information to track lead origins and report by search engine, search type, keyword, and campaign through your entire sales cycle.”

We’re also listening intently to the needs of current app users and integrating some of their needs into the final product. Thanks for all the feedback, everyone.

Don’t have it yet? Download SEO for Salesforce

Yount’s advice started making the rounds on Twitter, and the post was later edited – perhaps due to objections from Bing execs – to read as follows:

“Okay, the original post didn’t work out so well. While the ideas were sound, they were, apparently, a little too specific [sic]. On that note, if you are looking for link building ideas, I suggest reading our blog posts which may provide you with some ideas for developing links”

It’s clear that the advice wasn’t too specific for Web publishers and search marketers – any facts regarding how Bing generates search rankings is welcome. Unfortunately, his comment was too specific for Bing itself, which could be a sign that the company plans to be more cryptic about what Web publishers can do to participate in Bing’s rankings than even Google.  In the past, Google’s Matt Cutts has gone on the record about specific directories and news aggregation sites that meet with the search giant’s approval without censorship from Google execs.

The comment may also shed light on Bing’s treatment of nofollow markup. In 2009 it was widely observed that Bing, like Yahoo, did not seem to observe nofollow. At that time, Yount commented on Bing Community that it was a “known issue that we are working quickly to resolve.”

But if Yount’s comments about indexing links from Yahoo Buzz are correct, then perhaps Bing has rethought the issue. Yahoo Buzz contains nofollow on seemingly every outbound links. This begs the question: do Twitter links count? Do Delicious links count? Since Bing’s policy will affect how Web publishers handle their content, including outbound links, it seems only fair to state definitively what the company’s stance will be.