We’ve all heard Google is King, but is it really? In terms of sending traffic it most certainly is. Who has never used Google, and has been on the Internet before? Anybody? Even Marge Simpson, a cartoon character on T.V., has been seen using it. My question is, “Does Google get more search traffic now because it produces better results, or has it simply just become a trendy method to search?”

I use Google Analytics on many of my sites, so I decided to do a couple of test on three sites that have similar volumes of traffic. Each of them get about 3,000 monthly visitors with much of that traffic coming from search engines. What I was looking for was the behavior a visitor had when they visited my sites. How many pages did they look at? If they looked at a lot of pages, I would imagine my site was close to what they were looking for. So I ran the tests to see what was the average page view per visitor from each search engine. Here are the results.

Two Week Test

My first test was comparing: Google, MSN, Live, and Yahoo. I checked the average number of page views each visitor made from each search engine.

• Google visitor average page view: 4.76
• MSN visitor average page view: 4.94
• Live visitor average page view: 10.20
• Yahoo visitor average page view: 3.58

Live obviously was the king here, but I decided that two weeks was to short of a period for testing so I ran another test for two months.

Two Month Test

Running the same test, but over a period of two months.

• Google visitor average page view: 4.90
• MSN visitor average page view: 6.54
• Live visitor average page view: 8.54
• Yahoo visitor average page view: 4.52

Though the results were a little closer Live visitors still out performed the other search engines substantially.

Playing With the Numbers

I also want to make clear of the initial results per site when checking over a two month period. With every site I tested, Live visitors out performed the other search engines. So was the case for MSN, second only to it’s little brother Live. I also want to make clear that the sites tested were of totally different subject matter and industries.

Live is King

So for now, Live is King in my book. I will of course be running more numbers to see how things go. As far as I can tell though, visitors from Live spend more time on the sites I tested compared to other search engines so I can only come to the conclusion that their search results are better. I’ll have to kill off that Google toolbar, and try Lives’s now. Feel free to post some of your own results!

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