Universal Search – Why SEO Has Changed

The phrase Universal Search should be striking fear, or at least apprehension, into all SEOers. Universal Search is Google’s latest search design. They are combining all of their “Vertical Search” (how I loathe that phrase) properties, such as Video and News, into their main web search. Giving us the One Search to Rule Them All, rather than lots of smaller separate searches.

What does this mean from a SEO perspective?

• It is going to be harder to rank high for some key words, as you are now competing against videos, images, news and the like, as opposed to just websites.
• Videos, news, images are now more important from an SEO perspective.

This is potentially one of the biggest changes in Google Search since, well, since www.google.com was first rolled out. You are no longer competing against just other websites, but anything that Google can potentially spider. They are even throwing Google Books in there as well.

This is a lot different from the old way that Google inserted data from their other properties into Search, as since they have been working on the relevancy of these other results, they can roll them out across the whole of search instead of selected results as they did before. Google now has a much greater idea of what is important from these other properties and inserts them straight into The Results. One example that has been mentioned countless times is a search for Darth Vader. Look, there are videos in the serps for results 12 and 13. Which means… Less web pages in the rankings!

Can you see the issue here?

This is where you need to seriously start to look at diversifying your online presence. For a start, optimise images. It’s not too hard to do, and can have massive returns – we have had sites that gain a large portion of their traffic through image searches. Use Google Base / Products if you sell things. Now is the time to diversify your SEO. Create videos that are relevant, put lots of images of your products up. Heck, start writing press releases about your site and release them to the relevant sites. The point is that you are competing for relevancy with a lot more things now, and that you need to take this into account.

The next few months are going to be very interesting from an SEO perspective, and I am sure that we will have a lot more to say on this topic.

James
SEO Programmer