Sources Analytics: Google vs. Yahoo and Bing

Looking at my Google Analytics numbers for the first half of the year, I noticed something about traffic sources. This shows how much traffic came to my sites from various sources, and there is substantial difference between my sites in how much traffic comes from Google, Yahoo and Bing searches.

First, my law firm website:

Nearly 75% of the traffic comes from "organic" searches on Google. The next highest source is "cpc" (cost per click), my advertising on Google AdWords. Then Bing and Yahoo combine for just over 8% of site visits or about one-ninth of the traffic generated by organic Google searches.

Next, our traffic court website:

We don't use AdWords or other advertising to bring traffic to the site. Google is still dominant, with a 68% share. But Bing and Yahoo are much more prominent, with a combined 22% share, nearly triple their share on the law firm site.

I'm not sure how to explain the difference. One theory has to do with how the different search engines view these two sites. At first I thought maybe Bing and Yahoo were ranking my law firm site lower than Google ranks it. But I did some brief searches using my biggest keywords and they actually seem to rank my law firm site better than Google does.

Then it dawned on my to look at the other side of it. Bing and Yahoo rank my court website much better than Google does on searches for court names. So it's not that my law firm site does poorly on Bing and Yahoo, but that they treat my court site well.

Another theory is that SEO for law firms is far more competitive than for court directory websites. Many law firms are trying to get their websites to rank high on searches. On the other hand, search engines seem to give substantial credibility to government websites (i.e. official pages for the courts), which is the main competition for our court website. While the government doesn't actively compete in the SEO game, the search engines' favoritism is dramatic. Maybe the numbers suggest Google gives more weight to government websites than Yahoo and Bing do.

Just to add more information, my next biggest site is my Albany Lawyer blog:

Google has a 71% share and Bing/Yahoo are at about 12% together. And it's nice to see facebook sneaking in there.

And as a final and upbeat note, Town-Court.com had 1.75 million visits in the first half of the year, up 60% from the first half of last year. The site is roughly 1/100 the size and profit of LinkedIn, which is supposedly worth $8 billion. That would mean our site is worth $80 million. Any buyers? We'd sell at a substantial discount.

SEO for Lawyers?

As an attorney with a website, I get deluged with "experts" who want to help me with my SEO - search engine optimization. Here's excerpts from an e-mail I got today (in italics), with my comments (in regular font):

Hi Warren. I called your office today after seeing your PPC ad on the internet.

We did not get a call. For those who don't know, PPC means Pay-Per-Click - usually ads on Google.

We ... put your practice ahead of your competition ... for just about any way someone can type in a search for your practice areas. Our clients are found organically hundreds of ways right out of the gate. Eventually most are found over a thousand different ways.

I edited out some of the gobbledygook and it still looks like gobbledygook.

Two major things set us apart from any SEO or advertising company with which you’ve spoken or worked. For starters, we only work with a few lawyers per market for particular practice areas.

So you only work with a couple of my competitors? Wonderful.

Second, we have the only automated SEO content manager in the world. When Google makes a change to its rules, we update our content manager and all our clients (we have about 1,300 nationwide) are updated simultaneously.

In other words, they spam Google efficiently.

Please call when you have a few minutes and we’ll see if we are a good fit.

I was going to reply but hit the spam button instead. Here's what I was going to say:

"You have a page titled Search Engine Optimization For Law Firms, so I searched for that phrase. Your website wasn't on the first page. It wasn't on the second page. If you're so good at SEO, you would be on the first page."

Sometimes the e-mail solicitation will say something like: You don't rank on the first page for "new york city personal injury lawyer". Yeah, but I'm not in New York City. I wish these jerks would actually research us before they spam us. But that's life on the internet.

There are some excellent people out there doing SEO work, for lawyers and for other businesses. They don't get their clients through spam e-mails. If you want someone to help you with your SEO, do a search for SEO along with a relevant phrase based on topic ("for lawyers") or geography ("albany ny") or both. Whoever ranks high is probably good at it.

Adsense Ads and Bounce Rate

Do AdSense ads increase the bounce rate?

I've heard concerns about AdSense making a site look spammy in the past, and saw the idea mentioned in this discussion about link building and advertising.

The concern some in the SEO community have is that webmasters will not want to link to sites that have ads on them. There are varied reasons discussed in the above forum. One that stands out to me looks like a myth:

keep in mind ... bounce rate and ... the presence of adsense ads. ... some users ... hit the back button on some sites with adsense.

That's an interesting theory. Bounce rate refers to the percentage of users who leave a site right after landing on it, as opposed to those who visit other pages of the site. Some people think a high bounce rate is a bad thing.

Well, I checked this theory on my Traffic Court website. We have AdSense ads in most states but not all.

Let's start with New York - it's our original and biggest state, and we generally do not use Google ads on the NY pages of the site. I ran Analytics for a set period of time. See the image below - I use the Content by Title display and have my page titles set up so that this is a good (though not perfect) way of catching all pages from a particular state.

The bounce rate for NY for this period was about 67%.

Similarly we have little or no Google ads in New Jersey, and the bounce rate is about 69%:


Now let's look at two states that do have a lot of Google ads. First, Texas:

The bounce rate for Texas is actually lower - 65%. And let's check California also:

The bounce rate for California is lower still, at 64%.

Since the page title method is imperfect, I also looked at the Analytics Map Overlay to compare bounce rates for visitors from different states. This is another imperfect measure, but it may be helpful. Click on the image to enlarge if you can't read it.


Again, NY and NJ, which have almost no AdSense ads, have higher bounce rates than visitors coming from other states that do have AdSense ads - here California and Pennsylvania.

Based on these results, it would seem that the presence of AdSense ads has a minimal impact on bounce rate, and if anything it lowers it.

I'd love to read comments from others about this. What do you think about the impact of AdSense ads on bounce rate? Can you supply any numbers from your own web stats that would shed more light?

Dyslexic SEO with Flash

If you don't find this funny, you don't get SEO.

And if that doesn't persuade you, this is from one of their sites:

Apparently optimizing for misspellings. Or Mineloa is an fff'ing long Hawaiian island.

On the bright side, the lawyer probably ended up paying them $19.99.

Seriously, today's keyword is proofreading!