seo tips

Although vertical search parameters are a mature concept, they are a relatively new and exciting tool for the SEO practitioner. They are, if you will, search engines within search engines.

When you search in Google for example, it has long been the case that you can click the images tab or the news tab at the top of the page to filter your results into the relevant categories of retrievals. Over the last few years however, the search engines have started to incorporate vertical results into the natural results (i.e. not sponsored links).

You will notice if you type a celebrity’s name into Google, that often, depending on the popularity or news-worthiness of the individual at the time, you will see that the first few organic retrievals, or sometimes the second or third, will be images or videos or news stories related to that celebrity’s current ‘gossip.’

The search engines are trying to improve the user experience and as such the news stories will often be given enormous priority if they are recent. A video or image that is particularly relevant can achieve the same priority. These are ‘incorporated vertical results’ and can be extremely useful in SEO, particularly because lots of SEO companies have a tendency to overlook their effectiveness. Try typing ‘weather’ into Google now and see what comes up top.

For me, living in central London, the very top result is “England, City of London, 11 degrees, mostly cloudy (predictably)” and then next to this information are four small pictures summarising the forecast for the coming days. This is an incorporated vertical search result. Now I’ll try something more specific: President Obama has just had the health care reform passed in the United States, so I will search for, ‘Obama Health Care Reform.’ The top result is actually a vertical search result combining three high authority news stories from CNN, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Detroit Free Press. (Note; if I were to specify pages from the UK, we would probably see a different result at the top, like the BBC or Times Online.) More interestingly, half way down the page is a constantly refreshing ‘search screen within a search results page’ that is continuously scouring the internet not necessarily for the highest authority pages but the most up to date.

Whilst I write this, I can see stories, ‘1 minute ago, www.healthreform.gov,’ ‘2 minutes ago, twitter,’ and a continuous stream of websites that are being crawled and results for my search being brought to me almost as soon as they are published on the web – What a powerful tool the search engines have become! I have a point though; Imagine how influential it could be to piggyback onto the ever-increasing relevance of vertical search results from the point of view of an SEO practitioner….

Where Is Optimising For Vertical Search Particularly Useful?

One of the easiest ways for an SEO practitioner to exploit vertical search results is with the optimisation of local search. Google in particular is gradually becoming dominant (as always tends to be the case) in the local business search market. Given that Google has a >65% share of the search market, it is easy for it to prioritise its own local business results.

Although it still employs an impressive diversity algorithm, the local business search market is ever increasing and it is an important sector for Google to corner. Fortunately for SEO purposes, this makes it quick and easy to jump up in the search engine retrieval pages for specific businesses, even when a user is not actually specifying a local provider of a service.

Try typing ‘plumber’ into Google now.  The third result down from me is a vertical result detailing local plumbers to my location. Within this, Google is linking to local businesses that have registered themselves with ‘Google Local Businesses,’ and to its own maps that have detected plumbing businesses near my IP address using postcodes and street addresses. Clever stuff. It is always a good idea from an SEO perspective to register businesses that provide local services with Google Local Businesses.

It is worth researching what terms you want to focus on when registering though, as it’s all very well being a plumber a mile away from the user’s location but if you don’t target sensible keywords in the relevant terms section of the application, you won’t come up!

Effectiveness Of Optimising For Vertical Search

Image searching optimisation can be useful in many different ways. One such example might be to have an up to date image of a new product that is attracting a high search volume. If your alt tags are keyword rich for that product, your image might feature high on the SERPs and get some direct click throughs to your page that is selling the device.

This has obvious benefits for sales conversation rates of not just that product but other similar products or services on your site. Try searching for ‘flavour shaker’ on Google now. This is a product that was launched not so long ago by an English celebrity chef. The first two results for me are, naturally, the product’s homepage but the third result, and most importantly the first results from an outside company, is a vertical result. It consists of an image of the product and three retailers of the product, along with the price per unit on each respective retailer.

You can be sure if you were the company who had optimised for this image and had the lowest price next to it, you would secure the majority of clicks! If you then click the image directly, you realise that the picture is actually the return of a ‘Google Products’ vertical search, yet another type of vertical searching that Google provides. By being the most relevant and (also very importantly) the lowest priced retailer who have optimised for this picture and details of the product, Tesco have secured the top spot and will attract the majority of clicks and sales conversions, almost exclusively through vertical search optimisation.