Universal Search: Good or Bad?

By Dane Christensen

There was quite a buzz in the SEO community a few months ago when Google announced Universal Search. The buzz has now subsided to a low drone as people adjust to the new world order. With a few months of data logged, we thought this would be a good time to take a look at how this has really affected SEO efforts. Web analytics was made for events just like this.

Before we dive in, let’s just take a moment to enlighten anyone who has been on an extended summer vacation. On May 16, Google announced a new search model that “incorporate(s) information from a variety of previously separate sources – including videos, images, news, maps, books, and websites – into a single set of results.” The idea was to provide blended results that would better match the kind of information the user might be looking for.

Hard to argue with that. So why all the consternation from the SEO crowd? Well, if you have labored long and hard to push a website into position three of the search results, and then a bunch of videos, newspapers and books barge in there pushing you down to position six in one fell swoop, you’re liable to get a little peeved. It’s like cutting in line, and we all know how we feel about that. The real concern, of course, is that unless you actually have newspaper articles, video feeds or books on your website, you stand to lose organic search traffic to those other media, as they usurp your hard-earned positions.

Some SEO pundits have hailed this as a great opportunity for marketers to expand their service offerings into optimizing for these other media. Others have bemoaned it as an obstacle that makes an already tough job just that much tougher. And still others have suggested that it improves the search experience for the user, so it ultimately must be good for SEM specialists as well. No doubt there is truth to all of these positions.

But here at ClickTracks, we like to look at real-world results before speculating about what it all means. In this article, we’ll examine the data from a typical ecommerce website in order to get a clearer picture as to whether Universal Search is having any significant impact on organic search results. When Google made its announcement, it used a few interesting searches to illustrate the new blended results such as Steve Jobs and Darth Vader. We'll be using search terms that are a little more down-to-earth: home theater and business projectors.

Home Theater and Business Projectors
The first thing you will notice when you do searches on these more mundane topics is that the search results don’t look much different than they did before. After all, when was the last time you heard of a home theater making the daily news? The fact is, most searches are for things we need in our day-to-day, humdrum lives: “size 10 shoes”, “4X4 tires,” or “cheapest airfares to LA.".
Other than the occasional image, it’s hard to imagine media other than web pages rising to a top level of significance for searches such as these. So the first thing you may want to do to see if your organic traffic has been impacted by Universal Search is to Google a few of the top keywords found in your Search Report. We predict you will find, as we did in our random sampling, that there is an image here or there, and that’s about it.

So What Have We Learned?
We followed these steps for the home theater site and saw no decline in organic traffic from Google after Universal Search was launched. Chances are, you won’t either. But perform a reality check to make sure that this is the case! Investing a few moments to take another look at your keyword choices and search rankings is never a bad idea—even if Google hadn't changed their algorithm.

Use ClickTracks to find out if Universal Search is affecting your traffic and Google search rankings.

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Dane Christensen is a Professional Services guru at ClickTracks. Our Professional Services department offers one-on-one interactive sessions to help you with search engine optimization, campaign management, and web analytics. Contact Professional Services or call us 1-888-597-4727 ( 1-888-LYRISCS) (+831-621-6380 outside the U.S.).