With Google Universal on the search scene, iCrossing's VP of corporate strategy explains how to boost your search results, and what's ahead for the industry.
When Google introduced its "Universal" search system in late May, a wave of chills and thrills rippled across the digital marketing community. Reactions like this are not without precedent. After all, the search engine giant's periodic tweaks to its algorithm, launch of new alpha or beta services and slow but steady expansion into all realms of life have consistently been the subject of intense scrutiny, not to mention the fact that these sorts of changes do have an undeniable impact on many advertisers and publishers alike. At the end of the day, however, they are incremental in scope; their import pales in comparison to Universal, which may turn out to be the single biggest leap forward for search engine marketing since, well, the emergence of Google itself.
By integrating news, videos, images, books, blogs, local content and maps into search engine results pages (SERPs), Google tacitly acknowledged that an increasingly sophisticated audience of internet users had outgrown its existing interface. In other words, the standard presentation mechanism was no longer sufficient given the quantity and multiplicity of content that now exists on the web and the ways in which search engines have become the key entry point to accessing that content. Under the new system searchers get a blend of verticalized results when submitting a given query, although the results vary considerably depending on the keywords used.
For example, a search for "ratatouille" returns a mixture of results related to the hit animated film, including a widget that will link to local theaters and show times, trailers and news results, and recipes and photos of the dish that spawned the film (which appear toward the bottom of the first page of results). By contrast, in a search for very public figure like Al Gore, the image results appear at the very top of the page. In both cases, the new system allows searchers to utilize navigational links above the listings so they can more easily find the exact type of information they're looking for, whether it's images, video, news stories or blog posts.
Improvements to the interface are worthy of note from the user experience perspective alone, but the significance of Universal extends far beyond the presentation layer. In indexing and making every type of available digital content more accessible, Google (along followers like Ask's 3D search) has put an even greater premium on search engine optimization (SEO). In fact, by altering its data architecture and algorithms to fit the new system, it has radically transformed what constitutes SEO and made the question of what goes into achieving search visibility far more complex.
Leaving aside the question that some have posed -- whether we should fear, hate or love Google Universal -- it's probably safe to say that the new format of search results will ultimately prove to be a positive development for those marketers who take full advantage of the opportunity it presents. The web's growing importance as an information source and hence marketing medium has placed increased emphasis on bringing all offline marketing collateral online for some time now, but Google Universal really ratchets up the urgency, almost as if Google were demanding that all content become digital. Simply put, those who create and optimize content for verticals such as news, videos and blogs will create more opportunities to achieve visibility and steer traffic to their sites. A single truly optimized business has the potential to dominate the entire first page of results, particularly when it couples natural search supremacy with similar visibility in paid search. In March, I highlighted here how adopting a holistic approach to search can improve overall online performance.
Tactics for boosting Google Universal results
The next question, of course, is how to achieve that sort of dominance. From a nuts and bolts perspective, this entails things like uploading business-appropriate videos and images to sharing sites like YouTube and Google Video, which searchers can then play directly from a SERP (without clicking through the video sharing site itself). Businesses with local affiliates such as chain retailers, for example, should be especially vigilant about submitting address information for every brick-and-mortar location, as this will help improve visibility and drive online users into offline stores. News content, from recent press releases to archived articles, also gains greater currency with Universal, offering possibilities for enhanced presence in both web search and Google News. As I suggested in my previous column, with the internet evolving into more of a participation-based social network, providing multimedia content about your products and services is now a must-have. Without it, you run the increasing risk of literally disappearing in search. Much in the way that search itself functions as a "pull" medium, Google Universal is sucking all content from the offline world, indexing it and making it more findable.
Does Universal make our jobs as marketers more challenging? The answer is a resounding yes, but in a good way. With search engines encouraging marketers to engage in holistic search programs because of the very nature of SERPs themselves, the end result will be campaigns of greater complexity and markedly different consumer behavior patterns. Because we are still in the early going, we do not yet know the full extent of the importance of having a video or news story versus a web page in the first (or the fifth or last, for that matter) position of the results page. That insight will come as Universal becomes more universal, but ultimately it means more opportunities to create stronger connections with customers, and that is something everyone on both the agency and client sides are heavily invested in doing.
Noah Elkin, Ph.D., is vice president of corporate strategy at iCrossing. Read full bio.