33% of Google Users Stuck with Bing After a Two-Week Trial: Study via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

A study found that 33% of Google users continued to use Bing after trying it for two weeks. This challenges the prevailing notion about search engine preferences and Google’s market dominance.

The research, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, suggests Google’s market share isn’t just because it’s better. Many users haven’t tried alternatives.

The study was initially published in January but flew under our radar at the time. Hat tip to Windows Central for surfacing it again recently.

After reviewing the study, I felt it deserved a closer examination. Here are the findings that stand out.

Google’s Market Power: More Than Just Quality

Researchers from Stanford, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania tested 2,354 desktop internet users to understand why Google holds about 90% of the global search market.

They looked at several possible reasons for Google’s dominance:

• Better quality
• Wrong ideas about competitors
• Default browser settings
• Hassle of switching
• Users are not paying attention
• Data advantages

While many think Google wins purely on quality, the research shows it’s not that simple.

The researchers challenge these claims with their findings:

“Google, however, maintains that its success is driven by its high quality, that competition is ‘only a click away’ given the ease of switching, and that increasing returns to data are small over the relevant range.”

The “Try Before You Buy” Effect

One key finding stands out: after being paid to use Bing for two weeks, one-third of Google users continued to use Bing even after the payments stopped.

The researchers found:

“64 percent of participants who kept using Bing said it was better than they expected, and 59 percent said they got used to it.”

The study further explains:

“Exposure to Bing increased users’ self-reported perceptions of its quality by 0.6 standard deviations.

This represents “a third of the initial gap between Google and Bing and more than half a standard deviation.”

This suggests people avoid Bing not because it’s worse, but because they haven’t given it a fair shot.

Challenging Common Beliefs

When Google users were asked to choose their search engine (making switching simple), Bing’s share grew by only 1.1 percentage points.

This suggests that default settings affect market share mainly by preventing users from trying alternatives.

The authors state:

“Our results suggest that their perceptions about Bing improved after exposure. Default Change group participants who keep using Bing do so for two reasons. First, like Switch Bonus group participants, their valuation of Bing increases due to experience. Second, some participants may continue to prefer Google but not switch back due to persistent inattention.”

Analysis of Bing’s search data showed that even if Microsoft had access to Google’s search data, it wouldn’t dramatically improve results.

The researchers concluded:

“We estimate that if Bing had access to Google’s data, click-through rates would increase from 23.5 percent to 24.8 percent.”

The EU requires Google to display users with a choice of search engines, but this study suggests that such measures won’t be effective unless users try the alternatives.

The researchers add:

“Driven by the limited effects of our Active Choice intervention, our model predicts that choice screens would increase Bing’s market share by only 1.3 percentage points.”

How They Did the Research

Unlike studies that ask people questions, this one used a browser extension to track real search behavior over time.

The researchers split users into groups:

• A control group that changed nothing
• An “active choice” group that picked their preferred search engine
• A “default change” group paid to switch to Bing for two days
• A “switch bonus” group paid to use Bing for two weeks

They also measured how users’ opinions changed after trying different search engines. Many users rated Bing higher after using it.

What This Means

These findings suggest Google’s advantage comes from exposure, not just from being technically superior.

Current legal cases against Google may not have a significant impact unless they encourage more people to try alternatives.

The researchers conclude:

“Our results suggest that regulators and antitrust authorities can increase market efficiency by considering search engines as experience goods and designing remedies that induce learning.”

This research comes as Google faces legal challenges in both the US and the EU, with courts considering ways to increase competition in the search market.

For search marketers, the study suggests that Google’s position may not be as secure as many think, although competitors still face the challenge of persuading users to give them a try.

Featured Image: gguy/Shutterstock

Google Is Launching Search Central Deep Dive Events via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google announced via their Search Off the Record podcast that they are launching a multi-day conference series to enable in-depth workshops on SEO topics that matter. The series is launching as a test pilot in the Asia-Pacific region, then expanding from there.

Google’s Gary Illyes said that he’s been thinking of doing a multi-day event for the past year because he believes that the one-day format only allows for a relatively shallow coverage of important topics. He said that they’re constrained to 25 minutes to cover a topic which means that they end up speeding through the discussion without being able to “contextualize” them, to show how they’re relevant for people.

Gary explained:

“One of my pet peeves with Search Central Live is that we have these well-rehearsed talks that speed through one topic, and then you do, with that information, whatever you want. Basically, we don’t have time, like we have 25 minutes, maybe, for a talk. …how do you link the topic that you talked about to something tangible? Like, for example, if you are talking about crawling, then how do you show people how that looks like in Search Console or in server logs or whatever, if you don’t have the time, if you only have 25 minutes or even less?”

A Googler named Cherry commented:

“With longer time, of course, we can talk about more things, deeper things. We can have more time for networking, interactive… or even practical things that usually we might not have.”

Topics To Be Covered

The Googlers indicated that they’re not settled on the topics that they’ll cover, whether it will focus on the technical or marketing side of SEO or both. User feedback during the signup process may influence the sessions that they choose to present so that they can keep it relevant to what users in any particular geographic are are most concerned about.

Location Of Deep Dive Events

In a sign that this event is still in the planning stage, the Googlers said that they haven’t chosen where the first event will be held, only that they’re looking to kick them off in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region, mentioning that Bali is on the list of places under consideration. Budget is one of the considerations.

Search Central Live Global

Lastly, they announced that they will still be presenting Search Central Live but will be expanding it to more locations globally, including possibly to the Baltics.

Listen To Search Off The Record Episode 90

Featured Image by Shutterstock/fongleon356

Reimagining EEAT To Drive Higher Sales And Search Visibility via @sejournal, @martinibuster

The SEO Charity podcast recently discussed a different way to think about EEAT that focuses on activities that leads to external signals that Google may associate with the underlying concepts of EEAT (expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness). Google’s John Mueller recently said that EEAT is not something that you can add to a site and most of what was discussed on the show lines up perfectly with that reality.

The podcast, hosted by Olesia Korobka and Anton Shulke, featured Amanda Walls (LinkedIn profile), founder of Cedarwood Digital in Manchester, UK.

Aristotle And SEO

Amanda introduced the concept of applying Aristotle’s principles of ethos, pathos, and logos to SEO strategy. These principles are three ways to persuade site visitors and potential customers:

1. Credibility (ethos)
2. Emotional appeal (pathos)
3. Logical reasoning (logos), which is used to convince an audience.

Amanda explains these concepts in more depth but those three principles form the basis for her approach to creating the circumstances that lead to positive external signals that can be correlated to concepts like expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

Why It Matters for SEO

Amanda says that SEO is ultimately about driving leads and conversions, not just rankings and I agree with that 100%. The history of SEO is littered with gurus crowing about all the traffic they gained for clients but they never talk about the part that really matters which is sales and leads.

Link building historically falls into that trap where both the client and the link builder focus on how many links are acquired each month and look to traffic as evidence of success. But really, as Amanda points out, everything that a good SEO does should be focused on increasing sales. Nothing else matters.

Amanda explained:

“SEO is more than just rankings, it’s about conversion. It’s about business return. It’s about getting that success, those leads, those sales that we need… Bringing people to a website ….means nothing if they don’t convert. …we don’t just want to bring people to the website, we want them to engage and love your brand and have a really, really good reason to go through and fulfill the conversion journey.”

Reputation Management

Amanda recommends focusing on managing the business’s reputation, such as in reviews, interviews, and what’s written online about the brand.

She cites the following statistics:

• 87% of consumers will back out of a purchase decision if they read something negative about the brand.
• 81% of consumers do extensive research before a purchase, as much as 79 days.

Amanda prescribes findability, credibility, and persuasion as the ingredients for successful search optimization:

“We’re working on SEO to help people find us, and then most importantly, we are convincing them or we’re persuading them to actually go and purchase our product…”

Monitor Off-Site Signals

Amanda recommends regularly researching your brand to uncover potential issues, to monitor the online user sentiment, and to assess media coverage because poor off-site sentiment can remove users out of the conversion funnel.

Manage On-Site Signals

Amanda also recommends using the About Us page for sharing relatable stories that users can generate actual positive feelings for the brand, using the phrase emotional appeal to describe the experience users should get from an About Us page. She says that this can be as simple as telling potential customers about the business.

User-Generated Content And Authenticity

Many of the fastest growing business on the Internet cultivate high quality user generated content. Encouraging customers to post reviews and images helps to build confidence in products.

Amanda explains:

“And then also from a pathos perspective, you know, really getting that kind of user generated content, getting people to connect… because fundamentally humans, they buy from humans and the more human and the more emotional that we can be in our sales process, the more likely that we are to get that buy-in and that connection that we need to actually get across to our audience.”

Pitching To Journalists

This last part, pitching story ideas to journalists, is something that link building companies consistently get wrong. I know because I get approached by them all the time and they consistently have the wrong approach, which is focusing too much on links and not enough on understanding my audience.

I specialized in link building back in the early days of SEO (early 2000s). I was even the moderator of the link building forum at WebmasterWorld. Although I don’t do link building anymore, I have a vast, vast amount of experience persuading publishers to give my clients a link.

My opinion is that PR to journalists should be approached strictly for brand exposure. Don’t make links the goal.

Focus instead on building positive stories with journalists and let them write those articles with or without adding a link, let them decide. What will happen is that the consumers will go out and type your business’s name into Google and that’s a strong, strong signal. I prefer thousands of consumers typing my website’s name on Google over a handful of links, every time, all day long.

I strongly agree with what Amanda says about understanding a journalist’s audience:

“92% of journalists say that understanding their audience is crucial for them to consider a story pitch.”

Understanding the audience is super important. I’ll go even deeper and recommend understanding what motivates the audience. Focus on the reasons why a journalist’s readers will click an article title that’s displayed on Google News. Once you understand that part, I can practically guarantee that PR outreach approval rates will skyrocket.

Takeaway

The SEO Charity podcast episode featuring Amanda Walls introduces a novel way to build signals associated with Google’s EEAT (expertise, experience, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) by focusing on credibility, emotion, and logic in content strategy. Walls emphasizes using Aristotle’s persuasive principles to influence reputation, brand perception, and conversion, encouraging SEO strategies focused on meaningful business outcomes like leads and sales, with better search visibility that supports those ends.

Watch the SEO Charity episode on EEAT:

Reimagining E-E-A-T with Amanda Walls

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Ollyy