Catalyst Search Matters Search Marketing Blog

What is Google’s Universal Search

Google’s introduction of Universal Search essentially brings together the various types of searchable internet content sources into one, allowing results to range across all silos of the Google landscape, including categories that were previously segregated. These silos include book search, blog search, image search, local search, video search, web search, directory search, finance search, and many others. Thus, depending on the topic of your search, a local, book, news, or image result might place higher than a normal web result.

How does Universal Search Affect SEO?

The primary impact of Universal Search on SEO is that it increases the scope of SEO. This does not mean, however, that it is an obstacle for SEO efforts, per se. Rather, Universal Search expands the search playing field. More factors come into play, giving the search engine marketer more to worry about, but also more opportunities to gain traffic and project a favorable brand image. Now that search results may include videos, blogs, news, books, stock quotes, and scholarly articles, in addition to ordinary websites, SEO strategy must reach beyond the conventional domain of “your website.”

As results from different categories start to appear, rankings and placements of conventional web search results will change. The SEO landscape is now more competitive, because whole new categories of competitors have entered the fray. So, what was a #9 ranking on page one prior to Universal Search, could now be pushed to page two by the inclusions of highly ranked news, video or image listings.

But more worrisome than the potential loss of rankings is the issue of what might be showing up instead. Consider the search results page below for the query “Zyprexa drug.” While Zyprexa.com is nowhere to be found, there are some less-than-favorable news and video results about Zyprexa. The video featured is an interview posted on YouTube in which a former Eli Lilly sales rep talks about his role in downplaying the negative side effects of Zyprexa.

In this new type of search results page, getting more favorable videos and news results about Zyprexa onto this results page would be a crucial part of SEO efforts.

For pharmaceutical brands, there is another important change to the look and feel of the Google search results page. For queries on exact drug brand names, there is now a set of links labeled “Refine results for:”, which appear below the top paid search results, but above the top organic results.

This means two things:

1. Brands need to optimize their sites for dosing, side effects, interactions, healthcare professional, and patient related keyphrases. While Lipitor.com ranks #1 in a search on “lipitor”, they move down to #22 when you click on the “Drug Uses” link, and #13 when you click on the “Side Effects” link, and they do not appear anywhere on the first three pages when you click on the “Interactions” link. In fact, for many of these links, articles from Merck.com comparing Lipitor and Vytorin outrank Lipitor.com’s listing.
2. In order to appear at the real top of the page above these ‘Refine Results’ links, a brand would need to have a paid search listing for their brand name.

Another important note concerns the psychology of users’ attention flow on search engine results pages. It is a simple fact that on a page full of otherwise similar-looking text results, the one that has a picture next to it stands out. So, even if you rank #1 for searches on your brand name, a video, image or news listing with an illustration will be more salient to users than your ordinary text listing. For this reason, it is not simply enough to monitor these multimedia search listings, or outrank them. Marketers must instead take steps to procure their own multimedia listings, ones with positive and appropriate messaging.

How does Universal Search Affect Online Branding and Reputation Management?

It is likely that the only way for Zyprexa to keep the video of their turncoat sales rep out of the top search results would be to have a more relevant, higher-ranking video posted on YouTube about Zyprexa. This further foregrounds the necessity of monitoring a brand across multiple channels, including blogs, videos, news, etc. The reason why Universal Search may, in the short term, be a major blow to pharmaceutical marketers is that pharmaceutical brands have an extremely poor presence on the web, once you get beyond pure website-based search engine marketing. Taking a quick look on YouTube, it is easy to see that the top pharmaceutical companies and drug brands have almost zero presence, while detractors and parodists run rampant—they literally have the whole place to themselves. Consider the top YouTube listings for these major brand names:

YouTube Search for Merck:

1. A video entitled “MERCK - Mercenaries for Hire,” with the description “…Merck faces 9200 lawsuits from plaintiffs who blame Vioxx, the $2.5 billion arthritis painkiller Merck pulled off the market in 2004.”
2. A video of a violent altercation between a Merck employee and some animal rights activists.

YouTube Search for Ambien:

1-10. Primarily videos of pranks, hijinks, and amateur experiments involving people “hilariously” attempting to stay awake and perform various tasks while “wasted” on Ambien.

YouTube Search for Crestor:

1. A video full of racial epithets discussing the way that pharmaceuticals are marketed to minorities.
2. A video entitled “How to Sue Drug Companies for Free.”

Some brands, however, have taken the simple step of posting their regular television spots on YouTube. When configured correctly, these postings typically outrank the competition. Now, with Universal Search, these listing can show up in Google search results too, like the one below for Nexium:

If brands choose not venture into this arena, they are leaving the door wide open for less favorable Google search results like the Zyprexa sales rep interview above.

How does Universal Search Affect Paid Search?

While Universal Search most obviously impacts organic SEO campaigns, its effects on paid search campaigns are equally significant. Google’s revenue comes from clicks on paid ads, so you can bet they conducted user research to figure out what factors would increase the rate of clicks on paid ads. Increasing the volume of paid clicks is the unsurprising ulterior motive behind most improvements to “user experience.” By complicating the layout of the search results page with Related links and multimedia listings, Google is further blurring the line between paid and organic search results. With these new, more complicated results pages, the branding value of a top paid search listing is now greater than ever.

Conclusions

Search marketers have long advocated for “integrated” SEM campaigns, in which paid search, organic search, and online reputation management efforts were rooted in unified, comprehensive strategy. However, before Google’s Universal Search, searches for different types of media were executed on separate sites, and gave separate results, so the benefits of integrating these efforts were not entirely obvious. Now, by merging together the medium-based silos of information, Google has forced all SEM to be integrated, and to an even greater extent than most advertisers were prepared for. Optimal Universal Search results require us to further integrate our SEO and paid search efforts, and to go beyond the narrow, website-based conception of search into the dynamic world of news, blogs, and user-generated content. Previously, online reputation management was a tangential add-on to other online marketing efforts, but under the new paradigm, online reputation management has a crucial impact on Google search results. Brand marketers who neglect the new frontier of search will see their SEO and branding efforts suffer, but those who leverage the new opportunities provided by Universal Search will reach their customers even more loudly and clearly than before.

By:

Ehren Reilly
Paid Search Marketing Analyst

Eddie Emmanuel
Organic Search Marketing Strategist