Long tail, sharp sting
I’m a PC. My computer runs on Windows. Outlook is my work email client. In many ways, I’m part of the majority when the demographics are broken down. But in several instances, I’m not: I’ve been using Chrome since it was released (and before that, Firefox), Gmail for more than 3 years, and Premiere as my video editor. I’m part of the long tail for those, the minority platform users of a technology.
That’s all well and good, but only until that long tail starts to have a completely disproportionate effect on the rest of the market.
In May, executives behind the web browser Opera leapt into a contentious debate between Apple and Adobe regarding Adobe’s Flash video player. Apple’s iPhone has never had Flash capability because of Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ argument that Flash is too resource-intensive and battery-draining to support on a mobile phone.
Except, Safari and Opera combined have less than 9.5% of the market share under the most generous polling model. Neither browser is among the three most widely adopted platforms, and neither is growing at a rate that will threaten any of the top three (IE, Firefox, Chrome, for those of you keeping score).
Hubspot, the preeminent internet marketing consultancy, recently declared it would cease to track keywords through Google and switch its useful Keyword Grader tool over to Bing. This change has a massive effect on Hubspot’s customers as they now must have a much smaller proportion of the internet audience in mind when they make their SEO decisions. Hubspot claims the rankings are nearly identical between Google and Bing, but the number of keywords for which one site I work on was ranked dropped 70% due to the Hubspot switch.
What’s more, Bing isn’t even the second most-used search engine, according to rankings released by Experian. So Hubspot’s clients now must revise their strategies to consider the fact that their Keyword Grader rankings are based on only 10.74% of search traffic, rather than the 65+% Google can claim.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the minority of the audience having an influence on the majority – that’s how progress happens, after all. Perhaps Adobe will return to Flash and make some changes so that Safari and Opera users can reengage with the full availability of the internet. But unless that Bing user demographic (one-sixth the size of the Google user demographic) is identical in makeup to the internet audience as a whole, Hubspot’s switch renders the Keyword Grader tool useless as it ignores the search habits of 90% of internet users.
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Comments
The Bing Switch
Hi Adam,
Thanks for the blog post. This is a very important issue and I'm glad to see you have a strong opinion on how we help our customers research keywords.
There are a couple of things that I'd like to clear up. First, Google has not created a scalable public API to provide Google rankings to users, and so we knew that sooner or later we would need to remove Google rankings from our product. Microsoft, through Bing, has invested in creating this public repository of data around rankings that anyone can query, which we can scale to many HubSpot customers.
Second, the major reason we made the product change now is that personalized and local search were making Google rank results very confusing and irregular and were causing a lot of customer complaints on a daily basis. Matt Cutts from Google's web spam group acknowledges this change in this video that they released yesterday: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKTxSN7njhE&feature=youtube_gdata
Clearly, if Google is acknowledging that even their own ranking center in the Webmaster Tools is inaccurate to actual searches, the data cannot be provided with any accuracy. They are actively discouraging people from being able to report on search rankings easily, and when applied to the thousands of HubSpot customers, the situation was even more dire. Would we like to report on Google's search results data? Of course. Unfortunately, the data is extremely inaccurate and unreliable. We needed to make a change and provide our customers with reliable, stable data that could be verified in a real search engine. Bing is the only search engine that provides reliable, verifiable data.
We have done quite a bit of analysis before we rolled out this change as well, and we noticed that there are not significant fluctuations in ranking on the keywords you actually receive traffic on. There are examples of big fluctuations on some keywords, but in most cases they were words that our customers received no traffic on, and that had a very low search volume - Such as some very long tail words. For the critical words where they actually receive traffic and leads, the ranks are very stable.
Keyword research in HubSpot remains the same - Look for words where you're not ranking well yet, with a low to medium difficulty score, and create optimized content using the HubSpot software around those keywords. You can watch for success through your Sources tool and other charts to examine how successful you are being. The best way to measure yourself and your success isn't through the number of top-placing words that you have in search engines. The best way is by the amount of traffic, leads, and customers that you generate through organic search traffic.
I hope this is helpful. Please let me know if you have any questions.
Best,
Brian Whalley
Content & Community Manager, HubSpot
(Disclaimer: I work at HubSpot on our Customer Success team.)
Thanks for the reply,
Thanks for the reply, Brian.
I would be interested in knowing a little more about what sort of comparison studies Hubspot did before announcing the Google-to-Bing switch. Do you have any sort of data that indicates Bing's cross-section of internet users is representative of internet users as a whole? I suppose that's among my greatest concerns; the idea that we've gone from having 65% of search traffic dictating our SEO policies to only 10% is unsettling. I'm no statistics whiz, but unless that 10% is a representative sample, I would be worried that we're missing out on opportunities for keywords for which Bing doesn't get searched as often as Google does.
For example, two weeks ago, we ranked on several long tail keywords as we had for a couple of months. But when I looked yesterday and again today, most of those have vanished back into the "100+" state of affairs. Perhaps your comparative measurements of keyword rankings were accurate on the whole, but when one keyword of ours had its ranking flip from 45 to 100+ as a result of the change, that's a pretty huge shift. And of the five competitors that also ranked on that keyword, three of them disappeared, too, one of them from a top 20 position. So forgive me if I'm not completely assuaged by the explanation.
The only saving grace is that Bing also powers the number two search engine, Yahoo. I do hope results from Yahoo also go into the Keyword Grader tool, but that still raises the sampling of search traffic to a mere one-fifth of all traffic and less than one-third of Google's figures.
I'll keep looking at the tool, of course, but I may need to think of it as having a grain of salt added.
- Adam
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