Google Bard vs. the New Bing

This week I’ve been fortunate enough to get access to both Google Bard and the New Bing, so a day later, I’m here to share my first impressions.

What is the new Bing?

“The new Bing” is the product of Microsoft’s unholy alliance with OpenAI, makers of the now infamous ChatGPT. This development promises to have seismic effects on the search ecosystem, with Microsoft’s CEO saying they’re happy to accept “demonetization” of search in their pursuit of market share, and Google extremely concerned about the threat ChatGPT technology poses as an alternative to their core search business.

Of course, by now we’ve all also seen various viral posts and tweets showing just how dangerous it can be to use chat AI as a search engine, but that’s a topic for another day. For now, the point is that Bing is making moves.

When I perform a search on “old bing” now, I can see this box inviting me to try the new one. You’ll notice a key detail here: it’s only available in Microsoft Edge. Yikes. Big Microsoft Energy. Fortunately for you, the reader, I have dusted off everyone’s fourth-favorite browser so you don’t have to.

Performing the same search in the new Bing, I can see identical organic results, but rather different features:

The “mustelid masters” box above the organic results is new, and contains AI-generated text with a voice-to-speech capability. It’s a six-part story, with sometimes surprising accompanying imagery:

You can see here that a picture of wrestling has been sourced to accompany the text about badgers wrestling. These AI-generated boxes don’t appear for most queries — only clear and uncontroversial informational intents.

The phrase “Mustelid masters” itself seems to be original to this box.

Lastly, one of the tabs in the story cites the Wisconsin Badgers, and a page which is entirely unrelated to the content at hand, so perhaps Bing is also citing its sources for disambiguation here?

You’ll notice the addition of an “Open Website” button next to the top result on the SERP — perhaps a way of compensating a little for loss of organic click through rate?

The “chat” tab is also present on old Bing, but just shows you a message telling you to go to Microsoft Edge.

The phrase “conversational search” here is interesting, given this was a phrase Google introduced in 2013.

If we do use Microsoft Edge, we see a chatbot interface in this tab, but with some nice additions. Switching over to this from a regular search result pre-loads my previous query from organic search:

There’s a bunch of different modes available at the top, and also citations in the search results — both welcome improvements over the likes of ChatGPT.

Now, how about Bard?

What is Google Bard?

Well, not very self-confident, for one. But that’s probably a good thing.

Bard is also, right now, not anywhere near as integrated with search. In their announcement on February 6th, Google teased Bard in a way that made it look very much like a SERP feature, similar to Bing:

However, the version we have to play with now is more of a dedicated chatbot interface.

It was probably already the case that Google was pushed to move far sooner than they hoped with this technology, and of course they have much more to lose from messing with organic search than Bing does. So, it shouldn’t be a surprise to see the slower and more cautious approach.

Now, it probably should be noted that chatbots are not really designed for me to just enter a one word keyword like “badgers”, like I might do in organic search. But, like Bing’s chat tab, I get something resembling an informational result. So, let’s compare side by side.

Bard vs. new Bing, side-by-side

Click here to see the full side-by-side comparison.

The most obvious difference, at least to an SEO’s eye, is the presence of citations in the Bing result. Not knowing where source information comes from is one of the biggest challenges for users when dealing with this kind of technology, so that’s a huge differentiator.

Bard does claim to include citations. My colleague Mike was able to trigger them, and captured it in this clip. It’s definitely far, far less ubiquitous than on Bing.

That said, I like that the framing of Google’s solution — with multiple draft answers presented and “enter a prompt here” — which makes it clearer I’m dealing with something that is not a source of unassailable truth.

I was also intrigued by the localization of Bing’s result. It mentions the UK in its response, which is where I’m searching from, and shows UK websites in the citations. So I asked them both a follow-up question about my location:

Bing repeats itself, but Bard just seems to assume I’m in the US. Unfortunate.

Slightly commercial query

Many SEOs will be more interested in how technology like this might fit into their marketing funnel. Let’s try a classic top-of-funnel query:

Click here to see the full side-by-side comparison.

There isn’t really an objective answer here, but both results are broadly sensible. That said, the Bing answer is both a narrower list and far richer.

Interestingly, neither result seems deterministic.

Click here to see the full side-by-side comparison.

Bing can produce different answers to the same question in different windows, and so can Google.

Click here to see the full side-by-side comparison.

This may be a contentious point when SEOs start optimizing for these answers, and want to measure their results. Of course, regular organic rankings can vary massively between locales and even days of the week, but generally speaking, if you search twice from the same computer (in private browsing windows etc) you’ll get the same results. Not so here.

Conspiracy theories

Click here to see the full side-by-side comparison. 

Neither solution fell for some obvious conspiracy theory bait, which is encouraging to see. I actually don’t mind at all Google’s more cautious “I can’t assist with that” here. I wasn’t able to provoke a similar reaction out of Bing for any query, but I also wasn’t able to provoke it to say anything abhorrent - I’m sure others will, though.

What next for SEOs?

For both platforms there are major questions before SEOs can really engage and consider them an important part of their work.

For Bing, will this have adoption? Most SEOs have not made the habit of optimizing for Bing in recent years, but there is already talk of increased Bing market share.

For Bard, how, if at all, will this be integrated in search? The current platform is clearly marked as an experiment, and is more like ChatGPT than it is like the mock ups Google showed us in February. Or will users be encouraged to use it as its own thing?

For both platforms, there are big questions about how SEOs might go about optimizing to get their clients mentioned, and indeed favorably mentioned in results - there are lots of nefarious possibilities here, and Wikipedia is probably the most obvious. Once mentioned, how does one measure this? When I clicked through to my own site from Bing’s chat tab, it just appeared like any other Bing organic traffic. Rank tracking is an interesting problem too, and you can be sure that Moz and STAT will be posting in future about how we’re handling these features — watch this space!

13 Local Search Developments You Need to Know About from Q1 2023

Can you believe we’ve already sped through the first quarter of the new year? So much has happened, and on the strength of the warm reception this nascent local search quarterly review received in 2022, I’m going to continue the series this year. Thank you for being a reader. Let’s dive right into the most interesting new things we’ve seen in the first three months of 2023!

A new local search ranking factor!

Joy Hawkins and her Sterling Sky squad discovered something truly new this February: selecting pre-defined Google Business Profiles services from the list that Google offers some categories of business can have a tremendous positive impact on local pack rankings. Joy’s dream team is working to see whether custom-written services have a similar effect. For now, if Google shows you a choice of ready-made services (not to be confused with service areas) in your NMX interface and they relate to your business, definitely add them! By my count this brings us up to 5 GBP factors we strongly believe directly impact rank: title, URL, categories, reviews, and now, pre-defined services.

The ABCs of…ABC

In crunchy spherical fruit news, Apple launched Apple Business Connect to make it easier for local businesses to get on the map, because, of course, you want to reach those 137k iPhone users. Mike Blumenthal has the best write-up on the new ABC features, and Moz Local customers get a collective pat on the back because their info is already being distributed to Apple Maps hassle-free. I hope to have a column coming out soon on Apple’s launch, but in the meantime, local SEOs are seeing this as one more signal (amid all the AI chat buzz) that there could be a few cracks of competitive opportunity in the Google local monolith. It can be worth major money to win even a point away from Google’s market share, and this is an interesting time in search.

BBB as trusted source in troubleshooting

In other acronymic headlines, Stefan Somborac and Ben Fisher spotted Google requesting a link to your BBB listing in one of their assistive help forms. You may encounter this when reporting problems with your listings and need to go find yourself on the Better Business Bureau site. The Better Business Bureau has not always earned good press in local search circles, but this move from Google signals that they clearly trust the longstanding organization. Might be a good time to look at how you’re rated there.

GBP products in Google Shopping results

At first, there was uncertainty as to whether this was a new feature when Colan Nielsen spotted it, but on the strength of the “wows” from the local SEO community, Barry Schwartz did a write-up on this phenomenon of products that were manually added to Google Business Profiles showing up within the search engine’s large shopping interface. In the past, I had only seen products added via the Merchant Center appear this way. Communication of local inventory remains a major hurdle for independent businesses, and this change from Google is a good incentive to be sure you’re adding products to your Google Business Profiles with help, if you need it, from my handy tutorial.

Shelfies spotted in NYC

This March, when I wrote about the nifty idea of shelfies (photos of store shelves you upload to GBP to display the breadth of your inventory), I had yet to see Google altering 3-pack visuals to feature them based on my search language. Kudos to Mike Blumenthal for capturing a live instance of this behavior for “backpacks nyc” and note that the local pack images show many products instead of a single item. I’m still not seeing this in my west coast environs, but am even more convinced now that local businesses should be taking shelfies.

NMX Profile Strength leaves us feeling a bit weak

Darren Shaw’s tweet captures the real-time letdown of finding a novel New Merchant Experience feature…only to discover it seems like a sales tool for Google Ads. Apparently, in order to get a good Profile Strength score, you need to pay. Colan Nielsen perfectly summarizes the awkwardness that is happening for agencies as a result of this debut:

Google’s rollout of the NMX was not popular, and I don’t know how it is affecting local business owner engagement with the local product, but if this metric is meant to inspire more commitment from users to completing their free profiles, it’s odd to mix it up with a paid product. A red herring, a primrose path, a bait-and-switch, gammon and spinach? Hardly a brilliant success if agencies are telling their clients to ignore this “feature”. And speaking of things that were once free…

Local Service Ads: A whole lot going on

Matt Casady wrote an excellent article over at LocalU about dentists becoming eligible to “pay to play” via LSA. If you’re marketing a new practice or helping one compete in a dense market, you can purchase the visibility you need to fill the patient roster. This sounds like good news, at a glance, but it’s also part of the ongoing saga of local business visibility becoming less “free” at Google’s house. At last count, 70 categories have become eligible for LSA and Google just keeps adding to the list.

LSA isn’t just a budgetary woe for underfunded SMBs, but a hotbed of very concerning spam. As my friends at NearMedia point out in the foregoing article, LSA’s review requirements are a temptation to engage in review spam, and both fake businesses and fake review content are ending up getting recommended by Google in this program. If you’re thinking of paying Google for leads, please read Ben Fisher’s alarming piece on LSA arbitrage and spam, complete with real-world examples of some very deceptive ads. At this point, I don’t trust Google’s “guarantee” any more than I do the local packs…I’ve just seen too much fraud to pretend that such content is uniformly trustworthy. Not to say that Google isn’t making some efforts, including:

Emergency brakes during spam attacks

Another doff of the cap to Colan Nielsen for sharing a new Google doc explaining why and how they may suspend user generated content (UGC) including reviews, images, and videos during upticks in prohibited behavior. For example, if a business becomes major controversial news and begins to receive a large number of reviews from non-customers, Google can pull the emergency brake for a period of time to defend the brand (and the quality of the index).

This capability is not new, but the documentation of the practice is noteworthy. The problem is, it’s no guarantee that Google will protect you from a spam attack. Remember that review spam may not always consist of a bunch of obviously negative reviews. There’s the erosion tactic of leaving a lot of 4-star reviews to downgrade the 5-star rating of a business, and another trick I only recently encountered of spammers initially leaving a high-star review and then sneakily changing it to a low-star one. All good reasons to continuously monitor your reviews, using software if you find this task too time-consuming. And be prepared to act quickly with this step-by-step Mike Blumenthal tutorial if your business is sabotaged

Two scoops of juicy justifications

Damian Rollison brings us some better news about UGC this quarter, in the form of double local business justifications (some of which stem from reviews) appearing on listings. Justifications are textual snippets embellishing local business listings, like the, “My whole family uses them for car repairs,” shown above.

In my 2021 column, Local Justifications are a Big Deal and You Can Influence Them, I documented the different types of justifications I saw, including reviews, websites, posts, services, menus, in-stock, and sold here. At that time, however, all justifications I encountered in my study were single. Damian’s find is exciting because of the large amount of screen space being given to a double justification, with its dual conversion pitches. Have you written a Google post lately (actually, they are confusingly called “updates” now, so have you updated your GBP with an update, lately?). Double justifications would be well worth the effort, if you’re lucky enough to get them.

Immersive views for big buildings

When I was a child, my family had a coffee table book called Above London which showcased aerial photography of the capitol. Now, everyone and their cousin can buy a drone to get these kinds of shots, but lovers of new things will appreciate this tweet from Punit of the 360 Map View that Google then talked about as “immersive view” at their memorable Paris announcement. Looking up the Getty Museum in LA on Google Maps showed me that many big buildings in the area have this treatment. If your local business is contained within a landmark edifice, you could get this eagle’s eye view of where you work.

In non-Google news

Yelp has really struggled of late to compete with Google for local mindshare, but the fellows at Near Media drew my attention to a new report from the National Bureau of Economic research finding that restaurants which get listed on Yelp see a 5% increase in sales. In fact, even if your first reviews aren’t great, you still get a bump in diners. The restaurant business is HARD and that 5% could mean a great deal.

Actually, success is always the great challenge for nearly any local business, and that brings me to my last tidbit: the new, must-read report from the Institute of Local Self Reliance on the impact of dollar stores in the US. I have read countless articles over the past few years from towns and cities where dollar stores replaced all local variety and residents are stuck with little fresh food, dismal wages, and a loss of community identity. In 2022, nearly half of the businesses that opened in the US were some type of dollar store - an unprecedented figure, and these exemplars of the race to the bottom are the exact opposite of what independent businesses are working so hard to build.

I said this was non-Google news, but I’ve come to see Google Business Profiles as some of the best armor an SMB owner can don in the fight against lowered standards of living across the country. Use your profiles, and your website, and your social media to get the word out that your business is unique, local, ethical, green, family-owned, and a key contributor to the economic localism that makes the difference between a good place to live and a difficult place to be. Keep going, and I’ll be rooting for you in Q2!

Identify Featured Snippet Opportunities – Next Level

Featured snippets offer a fantastic opportunity for increased traffic and visibility for your site. There is a lot to say about this SERP feature and a lot that has already been said:

• Crystal Carter covered how to optimize existing content for featured snippets in an episode of Whiteboard Friday (complete with a handy dandy flow chart!) which is incredibly informative. Seriously, check it out.

• Additionally, Britney Muller has done multiple episodes on what featured snippets are, how to target them, and more.

So what can I possibly add to the conversation? Well, let’s take a look at how Moz Pro can help with identifying opportunities to gain (or steal) featured snippets within your existing toolkit. Then you can take the infinite wisdom of folks like Crystal and Britney to elevate your content to new heights (and SERP features).

A Refresher on Featured Snippets

Before we dig in, let’s take a brief moment to talk about what featured snippets are, just to refresh our memories. Featured snippets are a type of SERP feature which seek to answer a query using a snippet from a webpage. When a searcher makes a query, Google may attempt to answer that query by pulling out a portion of a site’s content to display directly in the results.

Sometimes, as seen in the example above, Google will even highlight the most relevant part of the blurb they’ve extracted.

Featured snippets can come in a variety of formats including paragraphs, numerical lists, bulleted lists, and more and can be identified by the inclusion of a source link at the bottom of the feature. These features are not to be confused with answer features which do not include a source link and typically have a slightly different format.

Now that we’ve refreshed our memories on what featured snippets are, let’s dive into how we can use Moz Pro to identify opportunities to snag them.

Moz Pro Campaigns

Moz Pro Campaigns offer a variety of data views and tools you can use to scope out featured snippet opportunities. To start, we’re going to take a look at the Rankings Overview section.

Rankings

Within the main Rankings tab, you can see and monitor your tracked site’s rankings for all your tracked keywords. Anywhere your site has acquired a featured snippet will be noted as a rank of #1, with a featured snippet icon beside it which looks like a pair of scissors.

Pro tip: In the above screenshot I’ve opted to label these keywords as “featured snippet” so I can keep an eye on them and identify if I lose a featured snippet due to a competitor overtaking me or by Google changing the SERP for those keywords to no longer include a snippet.

If we hop over to the Competition tab of our rankings section, we can start to spot opportunities to steal some of this prime real estate in the SERP. Just as we saw in the Rankings tab, any keyword where the #1 has earned a featured snippet will be indicated by that scissors icon. This means we can sort our tracked keywords by our tracked competitor’s rankings to identify where they are earning those SERP features and where I’m ranking in comparison. This can help me spot featured snippets within striking distance by showing me a side by side comparison.

Any keyword where we’re already ranking on the first page and there is a featured snippet present could be an opportunity for me to reformat and fine tune our content to scoop up that feature.

SERP Features

Now that we’ve identified opportunities related specifically to your competitors, let’s broaden our scope a bit. The SERP Features section of your Campaign can offer additional insight into opportunities for featured snippets outside of competitor rankings.

Within this section of your Campaign, the tool will note how many of your tracked keywords include a featured snippet in the SERP as well as how many of those your site has earned.

This can offer a great opportunity to investigate and identify featured snippet opportunities outside of your competitor rankings. We can filter by featured snippet to see which keywords include this SERP feature and then identify keywords where our site is not currently featured. This is indicated by a grey featured snippet icon. For keywords where our site is currently ranking but not included in the featured snippet, we may see an option to expand the Insights column.

By expanding this drawer we can see what site the current featured snippet is being pulled from along with the exact URL. We can then use this information to identify areas of opportunity for our own content. Can we possibly provide a better answer to the query? What kind of markup and formatting is the current snippet’s post using? What can we do to elevate my own content?

Pro tip: The SERP features section of your Campaign can be exported to CSV, as well. Within the export, any time a SERP feature is present but your site is not included, this will be indicated by TRUE. If your site is included in the SERP feature, it will be noted as Included.

Keyword Explorer

Now that we’ve taken a look at how we can use Moz Pro Campaigns to identify and monitor featured snippet opportunities, let’s look at a few ways we can use Keyword Explorer to supplement that information. Whether you’re doing keyword research for a new client, looking to identify featured snippet opportunities for your site, or you’re needing content ideas to build from, the Keyword Explorer tool is an invaluable addition to your tool kit.

First, let’s walk through a workflow to help identify existing opportunities for featured snippets. Britney Muller also touched on this workflow in her Whiteboard Friday episode “Featured Snippets: What to Know & How to Target.

1. In Keyword Explorer, enter your URL into Explore by Site

From within the Keyword Explorer > Explore by Site you have the option to enter a root domain, subdomain, subfolder, or exact page to see keywords you are already ranking for. The subdomain and subfolder options can be particularly helpful if you are doing research for a specific vertical of your business or section of your site. For example, you may be looking to capture featured snippets for your blog’s subfolder.

2. Filter your results by rank

After entering in your URL and clicking Analyze, you’ll have the option to view the Ranking Keywords. From this list, filter by Ranking to see only the keywords for which you’re ranking on the first page (positions 1-10).

3. Add keywords to a Keyword List

Now we have a list of keywords that could have the potential for a featured snippet opportunity. Let’s dig a little deeper. While it can be incredibly helpful to know what keywords you’re ranking #1 for (and it may be worth adding those to a Campaign to track and monitor over time) these may not present many new opportunities for your site. Google’s deduplication of featured snippet results in the SERP - meaning that if a site has earned the featured snippet, that same URL will not be listed in the remaining SERP results - means that if your site is included in the featured snippet, it is identified as position #1 in the SERP. So let’s find and select the keywords for which our site is ranking 2 to 10 and add them to a Keyword List in Keyword Explorer.

Pro tip: If your site is ranking for a large number of keywords it can be helpful to export your Ranking Keywords to CSV. You can then filter and sort by rank and search volume to identify your strongest opportunities and add them to a Keyword List via copy & paste.

4. Find keywords with Featured Snippet opportunities

Now that we have a list of potential keywords, let’s narrow it down further. Within our Keyword List, we can filter by SERP Feature to see only the keywords which have a featured snippet in the SERP.

We can then take these keywords and add them to a Campaign, do further research on them, or see what content is currently featured in the SERP and identify ways to improve our own content.

Pro tip: You can use the Rank Check feature to see what page on your site is currently ranking on the first page of the SERP for these keywords and export that data to CSV.

Explore by Keyword

Up next is a workflow to help us identify new opportunities and possible content ideas for featured snippet inclusion. We’ll be using Keyword Explorer again but we’ll be switching to the Explore by Keyword section.

1. In Keyword Explorer, enter your seed keyword into Explore by Keyword

Within Keyword Explorer > Explore by Keyword we have the ability to enter in a seed keyword or term and explore the SERP, keyword metrics, and Keyword Suggestions. In this example we’ll be scouting content ideas and featured snippets for a blog post all about homemade ice cream.

2. Click on Keyword suggestions

After entering “homemade ice cream” into the tool and clicking Analyze, we can click into Keyword Suggestions to see additional keyword ideas along with their relevancy and monthly volume.

3. Filter to see keyword suggestions that “are questions”

Considering that featured snippets are typically added to SERPs when Google is attempting to directly answer a query means that when writing a blog about homemade ice cream, we will want to know what people are asking about homemade ice cream. Within Keyword Suggestions, we can filter to display keyword suggestions which are specifically questions.

Filtering this way will allow us to see what people are asking, and how often they are asking it, in an attempt to nail down content ideas.

4. Select keywords and add to a Keyword List

Once we’ve identified some topics and questions that may be relevant to our new blog, we can select them using the checkboxes on the left and add them to a Keyword List for further analysis.

5. Find keywords with Featured Snippet opportunities

Finally, we’re going to revisit the last step from our previous workflow and filter our Keyword List by SERP Feature to see only the keywords which have a featured snippet in the SERP.

We now have a list of topic ideas and questions to consider answering in our new post all about homemade ice cream. This can help to inform our content along with the structure and markup for our posts. For example, we may decide to write a step-by-step process for how to make ice cream at home. Or we may publish a recipe for vanilla ice cream. Or we could even write a post all about the best ingredients to use when making an ice cream case to elevate our flavors. Regardless of what we decide to publish, we can now apply the tactics and strategies outlined by Crystal Carter and Britney Muller for featured snippet optimization to our shiny new list of topics.

Conclusion

Featured snippets aren’t going anywhere anytime soon — if anything, we seem to be seeing more and more varieties of them as time goes on. Identifying opportunities to optimize existing content or create new content for inclusion in them can lead to increased visibility (and possibly traffic) for your site. I hope you now feel prepared to go use the Moz Tools to scope out those prospects. With these actionable workflows in your toolkit, you’ll be able to rise to the top!