Universal Search: What It Means for Marketers

Google announced last week that they will begin incorporating some of their vertical and specialized search results into their “main” search engine results page. Currently, this means that search results that may have previously appeared only within Google Video, Google News, Google Local and Google Books are now beginning to appear within the “regular” search results. This has been dubbed, “Universal Search”.

What does it mean for marketers? If your website normally appears on the first page of a Google search for a particular keyword or phrase, there’ a good chance that the addition of these new vertical results could push your first page position to the second page. For marketers it means that search engine optimization just got harder.

So what can marketers do to leverage this change? The key is to take advantage of Google vertical/specialized search services. Upload videos to Google Video and YouTube, distribute press releases to Google News, list your business in Google Local, etc. That way you’ll have a chance that your vertical listings will be included on a Universal Results page if they are relevant for a particular search.