Google’s current “standard” SERP model mixes links, images, news stories, videos, and more. But what appears most often? And who gets the most out of it? A recent SearchMetrics study has the answers.
How Mixed Results Have Changed
Google launched universal search in 2007 and changed the world forever. How? Well, basically they started mixing in non-link content from a variety of sites. This content included videos, images, maps, shopping products, and beyond. But how has each category fared?
Unsurprisingly, videos have dominated the scene, rising dramatically in late 2010 and early 2011. It has since remained stable. Images also saw strong growth and, while they don’t appear nearly as often as videos, they’re showing the most steady increases.
With video and images on the rise, the path for SEOs is clear. As Dr. Horst Joepen, CEO of Searchmetrics, puts it, “It makes sense for marketers to increase the volume of video and image content they’re creating and to optimize it both on their own sites and on third party sites such as YouTube and Flickr.”
Shopping is doing well too, and though it saw a dip earlier in the year, it’s now starting to climb again. Maps and News items have remained stable, while Books are on the decline and Blogs are essentially non-existent.
Which Sites Are Helped?
The antitrust investigations (both European and American) of Google are focused on whether Google is unfairly favoring its own sites. When you see the sites that are benefiting from Google’s Universal Search, you gain a better understanding of why:
In videos, the top site gaining traffic is YouTube, which is owned by Google. In Maps its Google Maps, in Shopping its Google, and in images its Blogger (again, owned by Google). News is the only category where Google isn’t getting as much benefit, and they still rank seventh for the category.
Of course, others are benefiting as well. The Wall Street Journal, Daily Motion, a variety of hotel sites, WordPress, Meta Cafe, eHow, the New York Times, Zimbio, Deviant Art, and Amazon are just a few of the other sites getting a lot out of universal search optimization. For anyone who hasn’t taken advantage yet, let this serve as the wake up call for image and video optimization, at a bear minimum.
Related reading
IWD 2018: Eight SEO ladies give their advice on being a woman in search
In honor of International Women’s Day 2018, we wanted to highlight the perspectives of women working in SEO, and how – if at all – they think gender affects the industry and the work that they do. Search Engine Watch spoke to eight successful ladies in SEO to find out their thoughts and advice on being a woman in SEO.
Ranker: How to make a Google algorithm-proof website
Any SEO or webmaster who has ever had a website affected by a Google algorithm change – or feared being affected by one – has probably wished that they could find a way to make their website “algorithm-proof”. One site believes it has found the formula.
Mystified by martech? Introducing the ClickZ Buyers Guide series
Search Engine Watch sister site ClickZ has just launched the first report in its new series of buyers guides, which aims to to disentangle and demystify the martech landscape for marketers.
Pricesearcher: The biggest search engine you’ve never heard of
If you ask Siri to tell you the cost of an iPad near you, she won’t be able to provide you with an answer, because she doesn’t have the data. Until now, a complete view of prices on the internet has never existed. Enter Pricesearcher, a search engine that has set out to solve this problem by indexing all of the world’s prices.
