Google’s Universal Search—Good or Bad?
There has been some recent pushback in the blogosphere regarding Google’s universal search, which returns results to queries beyond simple Web sites – including videos, images, maps and local business listings. What’s all the buzz about? Google real estate is becoming increasingly more crowded as the search giant continues to expand monetization opportunities and it is causing some marketers frustration.
The most common source of frustration is the prominent position of universal search tools, such as local business ads, which pushes organic search results lower on the page. This effectively weakens the most dominant position achievable by SEO. Google’s position is that the local business advertising is directly relevant to the user’s search and is a helpful tool to examine the businesses that meet their geographic requirements.
Regardless of whether the universal search bothers you or not, as search engine marketers, it is important to adapt to the changing landscape. There are ways to minimize the impact of these changes on your program and continue using SEO to your greatest benefit.
Here are some tips:
1) SEO’s, don’t panic! Searchers will find you. Searchers will adapt to the extended universal search and continue looking towards the traditional organic results. Remember, Web searchers have become accustom to links to Web sites over the years and will not be quick to dismiss this type of result. Bottom line: continue developing well-rounded and robust SEO campaigns. Getting to the top of the organic results will continue yielding great ROI results.
2) Use long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are less likely to invoke universal search, at least for now. For example, instead of “Greek food” consider “authentic Greek food”. The former results in local business ads around position 4 while the latter has no local business ads on the first two pages.
3) Develop diverse marketing campaigns. As the marketing landscape changes, the need for diversifying your marketing strategy is becoming more urgent. Universal Search provides interesting opportunities to generate traffic away from the sidebar. Think of how you can adjust your strategy to take advantage of the new opportunities and expand your SEO initiative to be more robust.
Future suggestions to clients may include adding well optimized video to their site and You tube, increasing their social media presence as Twitter and the likes will soon be included on the SERPS, and making sure they appear “in the news” via press releases. This is only the tip of the iceberg in our ever changing industry as we’re sure there will be many other creative methods used to make sure we keep our clients above the fold on the SERPS.
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