Google Is a Rubbish Search Engine – It’s Time to Try Something Else
At Stovin Advertising, we spend a lot of time thinking about search engines, SEO and how businesses can get found online. But sometimes you have to question whether the search engine itself is getting things right.
Right now, Stovin.co.uk ranks number one in Bing for an important search term, yet the website doesn’t appear prominently in Google for the same search.
That raises a simple question: if one major search engine considers a website worthy of the number-one position, why can another struggle to show it at all?
SEO Should Reward Good Websites
SEO is supposed to help search engines identify useful, relevant and trustworthy websites.
Businesses invest considerable amounts of time and money into their websites. They create original content, optimise pages, build their reputation and improve their services. Naturally, they expect search engines to evaluate that work fairly.
But rankings can vary dramatically between search engines because each uses its own algorithms, signals and indexing systems.
From our experience with Stovin.co.uk, the difference can be enormous.
Bing: number one.
Google: nowhere near the same position.
When the difference is that extreme, it’s understandable to question Google’s ranking system.
Maybe Google Isn’t Always the Best Search Engine
Google has become so dominant that many people automatically use it without considering the alternatives.
But Google isn’t the internet.
There are other search engines, including Bing and DuckDuckGo, and sometimes they produce very different results.
If you can’t find what you’re looking for on Google, try searching for exactly the same thing somewhere else. You might be surprised by what appears.
A website being difficult to find on Google doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a poor website. It may simply mean Google’s algorithm doesn’t currently value it as highly as another search engine does.
SEO Isn’t the Same on Every Search Engine
The Stovin.co.uk example also demonstrates something important about SEO: there isn’t one universal ranking system.
A website can perform brilliantly on one search engine and poorly on another.
That means businesses shouldn’t necessarily judge the success of their entire SEO campaign from Google rankings alone. Bing visibility, referral traffic, direct visitors, enquiries and ultimately new customers can all matter.
Search engines also constantly recrawl websites and adjust rankings, meaning positions can fluctuate considerably.
It’s Time to Try the Competition
Competition between search engines is healthy.
If you’re unhappy with the results Google gives you, you don’t have to keep using it simply because everyone else does.
Try Bing. Try DuckDuckGo. Compare the results yourself.
At Stovin Advertising, we’ll continue working on our Google rankings. But we’re also paying attention to the search engines that already recognise the relevance and authority of Stovin.co.uk.
If Bing thinks we’re number one while Google struggles to find us, perhaps it’s worth asking whether Google always knows best.
Search differently. Compare the results. Decide for yourself.
