This week the Vice President of R&D at Bing, Dr. Harry Shum, released some interesting changes and facts regarding Bing’s search engine results page. The first being that the search engine results page (SERP) was going to be more ‘dynamic.’ The second is the percentage of search users that click on the first search result versus the 3rd, 4th and so forth.
Dynamic!
During his research of how users were using the SERP, Shum found that the standard ten links on the results page was “not the most useful way to present results; rather, we [will] adapt the search results page dynamically.” What this means is that instead of getting ten results when you search a query, you can get as little as four results for a search. For example, in the screen shot below, I simply searched “NYSE” and I only saw five results.
One of the more interesting things about the dynamic search results page is that if you do click on a link, and then click the back button you will get more results on the SERP. The results of more links being available once the user has clicked the back button “showed that the click-through rate on lower positions are a factor of five to eight times higher after a back button.”
Who’s Clicking on First?
The experiment also showed that more than 50% of searchers click on the first page, first result. With that said, if the first result includes deep links, then of those 50% more than 75% of them click on the deep links. After the 50% that click on the first result, we see a dramatic dive in the percent of people, 4-6%, that click on the 3rd result and further more, only 2-3% of searchers click on the 4th result. It is with these percentages that Bing decided to make the search results page dynamic.
Similarly to Google, who officially shifted from the 10 results per page to the 7 results per page earlier this year, Bing is making a shift that will directly affect your business and your websites ranking. Further more, the facts that are presented in this study, the one that indicates that 50% of searchers click on the first result on the first page, make a more compelling case for SEO services. As a business you already know the importance of visibility and a search engine optimization firm can help you get there, but now with Bing’s dynamic results page fewer search results and the hard facts that 50% of people are clicking the first result it makes being page one, number one, even more important.
