The Rocket Newsletter

May 2008

May in Brighton has seen festival season upon us with the Brighton Festival, Fringe Festival and Great Escape all featuring a huge array of music, artists and performances. With the sun popping out and the Bank Holidays to enjoy, it has been a great month.

It's pretty much over now but the arrival of Google's Universal Search should make searching for anything you missed simple. We say 'should' because we've looked and it's not being capitalised on by the organisers or artists. Which got us thinking "are any of our clients making best use of Universal Search?". This month we explain what it is and its benefits, next month we'll tell you how to make it work for you. As always if you have any questions just ask us rocket@propellernet.co.uk. 

Understanding the benefits of Google's Universal Search

We've been working in the search marketing industry for many years now and the way that search engines display search results is ever changing and evolving. The move by Google last year to introduce "Universal Search" was perhaps the biggest evolution since pay per click advertising appeared in search results. So what exactly is Universal Search?

Google now blends listings from its news, video, images, local and book search engines among those it gathers from crawling web pages. Yahoo!, Ask and MSN all have versions of blended search but it is Google (the almighty) that we consider when we ask you the question "are you maximising your Universal Search potential?"

In this article we aim to give you an insight into Universal Search. In a second part we'll look at how you can get your website listed in Universal Search.

The big idea

The whole idea behind Universal Search is that Google wants to make the 'search experience' better. Even if you don't know what a Universal Search result looks like you could probably suggest what might work for the average searcher i.e. you. Consider you are visiting Bath for a romantic weekend. You search for Bath + romantic + weekend break. Traditionally Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) contained a mixture of natural search listings (SEO) and sponsored (paid search) listings. This would most likely have given you a selection of hotel booking websites. Now what you could see, as Google includes blended listings will be blog entries, video clips, weather results, listings for restaurants, show reviews and other experiences posted on the web by others who had enjoyed a romantic weekend in Bath.

These additional listings impact hugely on the visibility of organic search results that they move down the page. However most businesses don't realise that these "blended search" results can be influenced in the same way. If you are worried about getting left behind don't be. Research from comScore in January shows the percentage of search results which feature Universal Search at about 17%. We at Propellernet are excited about the opportunities that lie ahead.

Benefits of Universal Search

Advantages for users:

  • Searches for breaking news stories can return results from Google News, published within the hour and seamlessly integrated into the natural listings.
  • Blogs will enjoy similarly fast listings to the news index, as Google recognises their growing importance.
  • By integrating different sources and media types, without excessively cross linking to vertical results, Google is putting relevance at the heart of the experience.
  • A video may answer your search "question" better than a text-based document, so save the trouble of searching each database separately with blended results.
  • Image results also come in handy on some search results, "a picture means a thousand words" after all.

Opportunities for businesses and site publishers:

  • More opportunities to be represented on search results.
  • Distributing your content across Google's vertical search databases can now reach considerably more eyeballs than before.
  • The process can be fairly straightforward in many cases.

What are the downsides?

Some sceptics are reporting:

  • Now that you can watch a video on a Google SERP (search engine results page), does this make Google a "destination" in itself?
  • Will varied results lead to user confusion?
  • For those still on dial-up connections (is anyone really?) video results may be too slow for comfort.
  • No option to switch off Universal Search.
  • From an advertisers' perspective, eye-catching results in the middle of the page may distract users away from the AdWords listings.

Here to stay

Whether keen or not, Universal Search appears to be hear to stay, and in our opinion that's a good thing for users and presents a major opportunity for our clients' businesses. It also keeps our jobs interesting ensuring we're on top of the ever evolving Search landscape.

Best regards,

Client Corner - User centred link development

At Propellernet, we aim to put the end user (or target customer) at the heart of all our search strategies.  In fact some of the most effective link development campaigns we've conducted recently have been as a result of following this...

Simple process:

1.  Understand who the target customers are.
      - Why do they use our client's service?
      - What do they do online?
2.  Provide content that addresses their needs, and pulls them to our client's site.

In a recent case, we were fortunate to have identified some great content that matched the needs of three distinct target groups for one client.  The content was well researched and scarcely available elsewhere online.  However it was buried deep within our client's website.  All the "good stuff" was poorly formatted, so much so that should a perfect target customer have found it, they may not have known what they were looking at or what to do with it.

We took the content, reformatted to improve usability and link worthiness, and then set about getting eyeballs to it. 

Our distinct personas here each fell into different interest groups (niches).  By researching and personally contacting bloggers and website editors, we were able to establish visibility for our client on websites where our target customers spend their time.

The benefits of this were threefold:

1.  Increased brand awareness, highlighting the relationship between our client and their target groups.
2.  Direct traffic from the target websites to our client site.
3.  Inbound links to the client site that had a major impact on Natural Search performance.

Gavin Willis

Staff Profile

Name: Gavin Willis
Role: Key Client Manager

Why Propellernet?
I love that we continue to be such a growing force within the industry. The team morale and togetherness is brilliant, and the support provided is invaluable. This is why we can work so closely with our clients and deliver such excellent results. Actually, on second thoughts, it is because we work seconds away from the beach!

Interesting Fact:
I have recently bought my first house in Shoreham Beach, which came fully furnished with all the showroom goodies, This is perfect as DIY is not one of my favourite past times.

 

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