RANKABOVE

Real Time & Universal Search:SEO for Tomorrow

2011

• The Ever-Changing SERP.

• What is Blended/Universal Search?

• What is Instant/Real-Time Search?

• How does it help?

• How do you optimize for it?

Agenda

Blended search, also known as “Universal Search” or “Search 3.0″, is incorporating results from non-web sources (like books, videos and images) into the regular web search results.

What is Blended Search?

Blended Search History

Why Blended?

• Better for Users.• Better for Sites.• Better for Engines.

Google Loves Rich Media

Regular

Blended

0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35% 40%

12%

38%

Users Love Rich MediaBlended Results Garner Much Higher Click-Through Rates Than Regular Results

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

Images

VideoNews

Text84%

19%12%18%

C T R

Especially Images & Video

87%

43%

Bounce Rate

1.03

1.87

Depth

0:22

1:41

Length

Personalities/Fashion

Products/Commerce

91%

8% CTR

Images Sometimes Rock

Text

Video

0%

2%

4%

6%

8%

10%

12%

14%

16%

18%

20%

12%

19%

Across all positions, video results with thumbnails generate higher CTRs

Video Always Rocks

12

34

56

78

910

Page 2

0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%

35%

40%

45%

Video CTR Text CTR

CTR Across Positions

Video Viewers Shop!

All Pro

ducts

Home & Li

ving

Online Se

rvice

s

Apparel, a

ccesso

ries, j

ewelry

Books, m

usic, v

ideo

Electronics

& co

mputing0.0%

5.0%

10.0%

15.0%

20.0%

25.0%

Total InternetVideo Streamers

21%

Buyers per visitor vs video viewer

20%

21% 22% 22% 22%

Video viewers are 20% more likely to make a purchase online

Source: comScore

Video Viewers Stay!

Video Users stay on the site longer, visit more pages and bounce less often

CollegeHumor formatted its videos so that

Google understood they were videos.

Once they did, and thumbnails began being displayed in the SERPS,

CTRs went way up.

After all, which would you click?

Vs.

Which Would You Click?

Before Instant

After Instant

Video up 28% across the board!

Even Better With instant

CTR

What is Instant Search?

Changes with Instant

• Less Space on SERP.• Long-Tail Keyword Compression.• Rich Media Rules.• The Prude Paradox.

Depending on screen size, searchers using Google Instant see between 2 and 5 organic results, instead of the 4 to 7 results seen without Instant.

Less SERP Space

What I Thought…

What Actually Happened

-13.55

6.13

0.60

-15 -10 -5 0 5 10

Positions 10+

Positions 5-10

Positions 1-5

Change After Instant

What Actually Happened

-15

-10

-5

0

5

10

15

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Change By Position

Long Tail Compression

Because Google Instant focuses the user’s attention on more popular search phrases, by

suggesting them and showing their results, less users use more

obscure phrases.

How Will It Affect You?

If your company sold iPod Car Adapters, but ranked for a lesser-

used phrase, like “iPod Car Cables,” it is unlikely that a

searcher using Instant would get to that search.

Long Tail Data

540,000

550,000

560,000

570,000

580,000

590,000

600,000

610,000

620,000

630,000

640,000

13,000,000

13,200,000

13,400,000

13,600,000

13,800,000

14,000,000

14,200,000

14,400,000

Before Instant After Instant

Traffic

Keywords

Prude Paradox

Even with SafeSearch turned off, Google Instant will not show

suggestions for adult terms. But for some reason, that makes traffic from mature phrases for non-adult sites,

rise. Take a look at this.

Prude Paradox

Before Instant After Instant

33% Increase!

SEX!

SEX

Traffic from mature keywords grew 20%. Traffic from keywords with the term “sex” shot up 33%

• Video– People like videos; they are good for eCommerce sites too, not just content.– Create video content.– Create & Submit a Video Sitemaps.– Mark up videos with microformats to let the Search Engines know they are

videos.• Pictures

– Pictures benefit some sites, not all.– Add images to XML Sitemaps.– Make sure there is a reason to see the next photo.

• News– Submit site to Google News.

• Products– Submit data feed to Google Base.

Adding Rich Media

– Make sure you host the video and/or CNAMEs for CDNs are set correctly.

– Make sure your sitemaps and/or microformats are correct.

– Summit your sitemaps and add to your Robots.txt.– Make sure your URLs are not too long.– Your videos must be family-friendly.– Choose a good thumbnail.– You need textual content too: transcripts, tags, titles,

comments, translation, etc…– Regular SEO for the page.– Use multiple navigational paths: hierarchical,

folksonomic & supplemental.

Optimizing Video

• Images– Alt tag, image name, title and content on the page around the

image.– Add more data: EXIF, tags, context, captions and more.– Google “lightboxes” images—add prominent navigation.– Host, or use CNAMEs correctly if you use a CDN.– Add to XML Sitemap via the <image> tag.

• Others– Correct formats.– Keep track of new blends, like episodes.

Optimizing Other Media

Google vs Bing vs Yahoo!Justin Bieber!

• News• Tweets• Music

• Accordion w/Twitter & Videos

• Sites

• Box with Wikipedia, Songs & Images

• Sites & Videos

Google vs Bing vs Yahoo!• Blended Search means different

rankings in Yahoo! & Bing• Twitter – the new darling of Google, for

links and for SERPs• Different suggestions• Different side links• Different content (Bing filters torrent

sites)

The Future

• RankAbove Looked at 10 Sites Over Six Months. Monthly, We Analyzed:–150MM+ Visits from SEO–20MM+ Video Hits from SEO–100K+ Image Hits from SEO–1MM+ Keywords–100K Tracked Rankings

Our Data

Want to Know More?

Eli Feldblumeli@rankabove.com@FeldBum@RankAbovewww.rankabove.com