Welcome to the Next Generation of Search
Posted on: Saturday, 31 May 2008, 03:00 CDT
By Benjamin, Kim
Search is evolving. It's no longer enough to help people find your website. They want biogs, videos, images and maps, writes Kim Benjamin If you typed the words 'dove natural beauty' into Google at the end of February, you might have got some unexpected results. The most prominent listings would not only have included links to the beauty product manufacturer's Campaign for Real Beauty website, but would also have shown references to Dove product blogs and an image of one of the brand's videos on YouTube. It's a clear example of how brands are starting to adopt new techniques in search, where listings are based not just on text references, but also incorporate other media such as blogs, videos, images and maps.
In the past year, the likes of Google, Ask, Microsoft and Yahoo! have all developed their offerings to reflect this type of search. Ask's version, Ask3D, for example, includes all vertical results into a single page segmented into three subsections: news, images and videos. Google's offering, launched in June last year, blends results from news, video, images and blogs into its main listings, based on the current popularity of vertical results for the same query.
Call it what you will - choose a name from the following list: universal, blended, integrated or multi-channel search - it's becoming increasingly important for digital marketers to consider this type of search as part of their organic or natural search engine listings. "If you are going to be successful in your use of organic search, your content strategy must consider multiple formats," says Gareth Gaston, director of distribution and e- commerce at Ramada Jarvis Hotels. "Brands have to get into the customers' minds and understand what keywords they might type to research products or services."
According to Grant Whiteside, technical director at searchengine marketing company Ambergreen, universal search gives brands the opportunity to communicate in a medium that best connects with their target market. "Brands can use their websites, campaign-specific microsites, blogs, videos, images and positive user-generated content to increase their presence online," he says. "Having a range of marketing media to choose from also means the chances of a click through to the website, blog or video are greater."
The benefits for clients of investing in these new searchmarketing techniques are clear: they enhance the user experience and make It easier for users to find what they are looking for. Louise Schirmer, head of digital consumer marketing at Coca-Cola, says that serving multimedia content in search tat will enable clients to communicate their messages and online assets in a more rounded way. "For example, audio-visual content, which can be more attractive to a consumer, could be displayed alongside text content, creating a deeper message," she says.
Universal search also offers more opportunities for brands to achieve a higher visibility on natural or organic listings. Richard Gregory, chief operations officer of internet marketing agency Latitude Group, says that a brand could take up to half of the listings on the initial results page. "Brands could optimise their sites well enough to appear five times in the natural-listings results page," he says. "It enhances the user experience because different queries suit particular media. For example, if you were performing a travel search, a map result would be relevant, or if you were looking at property, you might want a video result with a virtual tour of a place."
Universal search might not be appropriate for all brands, however. A financial services company, for example, might not benefit from optimising images, whereas brands in the retail or travel sector would view it as attractive option. Holiday park operator Haven Holidays has worked with Latitude Group to optimise listings for its holiday parks using maps, while MyTravel, part of the Thomas Cook brand, is working with Ambergreen to optimise its search-engine marketing across a range of media including blogs, videos and user-generated content.
While few in the industry doubt the potential universal search offers, it does change the nature of search-engine optimisation. For a client, this means that any SEO strategy and choice of keywords and tagging has to extend beyond its own website to include blogs, videos and images from other sources referencing its brand. The challenge for clients who choose not to optimise across all the media now available on the web is that images and text could appear that are out of their control, which can have a damaging, rather than positive effect on the brand.
This could have implications in terms of reputation management. For clients looking to optimise results using universal search, it will become increasingly important to check how their brand appears across all vertical search engines. This will require additional investment in resources to ensure that content can be monitored and updated on a regular basis. "In the past, negative publicity in a YouTube video may not have caused too much concern because it may not have gained significant traction," says Nilhan Jayasinghe, head of natural search at digital marketing company iCrossing UK. "Today, however, however, the video could appear in Google's main resuits and escalate into something more problematic in a much shorter timeframe. This also presents brands with an opportunity though, because more traffic can be generated by distributing content to vertical indices."
According to Duncan Parry, director of strategy at digital agency Steak Media, the development and increasing uptake of universal- search techniques could also mean that sites with high natural listings may also be pushed further down the screen by blended results. "From an advertiser's point of view, this could be seen as negative. But universal search is an opportunity for any advertiser that has other digital assets it can publish online - for example, videos or image banks - and its natural-search efforts in future will need to take into account optimisation of these."
There are other issues to consider too, such as how to monitor the performance of text versus blogs versus images and videos, as well as ensuring the quality of these multimedia formats when they appear in search.
Brands that have these assets at their disposal are recognising the need to test these techniques, as in the case of entertainment website, contactmusic.com. "There are mixed results as to how videos are ranked currently," says Gregory. "It seems to be all or nothing, but this may change in time, because the concept is still quite new. There is software available to monitor blogs for text references, but I'm not aware of any software that monitors video content."
Relevancy and quality of content is therefore key to reaping the benefits of universal search - what might be relevant today in terms of content may not be the case tomorrow. "Websites will need to be well indexed and have relevant, updated and well-thought-out content. It's not just about volume or about where you rank on Google for your brand name," says Simon Wharton, managing director of internet marketing company PushOn. "It's about how much relevant traffic your site receives and how well that converts into action."
Broader implications
In terms of paid search (pay per click), universal search could also have important implications. According to Warren Cowan, managing director of search-engine marketing company Greenlight, it could begin to appear within the sponsored links sections of a search results page, providing marketers with the ability to use images or video ads instead of or to supplement standard text-based ads. "Image ads are already used in Google's contextual ad network, for example, but there is no evidence to suggest that this is at the top of Google's short-term agenda," he says.
Gregory says universal search has the potential to create more competition between natural and paid search, because click-through rates could increase in natural search at the expense of paid search, and because more eye-catching results will appear in the natural listings. "This will directly affect the ad revenues of Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, and one has to assume that they will look to create more multimedia formats for paid-search ads," he says.
According to Jayasinghe, search engines have yet to provide data on the success of blended results. Third-party studies, however, he says, show that blended and personalised results increase click- through rates, suggesting this can improve the user's search experience.
Shirmer believes that the question of whether the next generation of search will incorporate multimedia formats will be determined by users. "Search engines may try this approach but whether it's valuable for the user will determine its long-term viability," she says.
It's clear that universal search is here and that its use is set to grow. As advertisers have more assets that can be classified as separate search results, more results will be shown for their content - not only from their own websites but also gathered from other sources. Getting to the top of the natural listings page will therefore become more and more challenging for brands. Clients will need to test, learn and refine their activity on a regular basis to ensure they are gaining the most relevant positioning against the right search terms. MyTravel finds success with universal search
MyTravel, part of the Thomas Cook Group, wanted to create an integrated search-engine marketing programme to increase its visibility on search pages and to ensure that all MyTravel brands would appear for relevant search terms, converting into bookings and increasing online sales.
Russell Gould, head of e-commerce at Thomas Cook, initially tasked search-marketing agency Ambergreen to create a targeted, integrated search campaign for natural listings. It also commissioned a pay-per-click campaign from agency MVI. Ambergreen initially carried out keyword research to identify generic and destination search terms that would generate traffic and ensure search engines would find MyTravel.
MyTravel also wanted to explore new search techniques, combining text with other forms of media to help build a relationship between the brand and consumer, with the aim of increasing repeat purchases. Ambergreen created a MyTravel channel on YouTube and uploaded MyTravel guides, optimising content such as videos so they would appear on the search-engine results for targeted terms. MyTravel has thousands of web pages and it planned to optimise every page. By making sure all internal pages were indexed and found, the search engines were able to serve the most relevant results to users. Ambergreen was tasked with ensuring the searcher went directly to the relevant page in one click, cutting down the time taken to search and eliminating drop-off rates.
By having a YouTube video, a holidaymaker's blog and a review at the top of the results, MyTravel has been able to give users better content and more targeted results, enabling it to deliver a more rounded picture of its services.
The use of blogs, feeds and and videos alongside text-based search has attracted 350,000 visitors a month and natural-search bookings have increased by 387 per cent since the start of activity, while conversion rates have increased by 65 per cent. Spend on paid- search campaigns has also been reduced, by migrating brand terms from paid to natural search.
MyTravel: created a channel on YouTube
Brands can use their websites, campaign specific microsites, blogs, videos, images and user-generated content to increase their presence online
Grant Whiteside, Ambergreen
If you are going to be successful in your use of organic search, your content strategy must consider multiple formats. Brands have to get into the customers' minds
Gareth Gaston, Ramada Jarvis Hotels
Contactmusic.com optimises its image content
Entertainment website Contactmusic.com has used natural search exclusively since its launch in 2000. With more than 2,000 images from around the world uploaded to the site every day, covering music, film, games and the latest celebrity gossip, it wanted to optimise its images so they would appear higher on the search- engine listings pages.
Having previously carried out most of its search marketing in- house, Contactmusic hired search-engine marketing agency Greenlight in August last year to help it optimise its image content. The company is also investing in graphic analysis techniques and is working with PDS Media to increase the quality of its image recognition across search engines. "We have a wealth of images on the site and our challenge is to make sure they are all visible to search engines and to users," says Contactmusic.com commercial director, Antony Johnson.
He says optimising images is a key way of attracting audiences to the site and increasing the time they spend there. He believes developments in universal search will mean it will become increasingly important for brands to ensure their natural listings appear in the top three to four places on a results page. "Anything that helps users find what they are looking for is a good thing - and even giving people something they might not have realised they wanted (such as an image) helps to increase clicks," he says. "A search for 'Paul McCartney', for example, will have an image, followed by a biography and then a review of his album. This is one of the reasons we have invested in new techniques such as universal search - if you can present content with images and text, users are more likely to click through to the site even if it appears in third place on the listings page."
Having implemented image optimisation in December last year, it is still too early for Contactmusic to gather full results, but Johnson says there has been a significant increase in activity, with figures so far showing traffic has doubled.
Contactmusic.com is now starting to look at ways to get its video content to appear higher on search results pages because the site also offers film trailers, but Johnson admits there is still some way to go towards getting this right. "It would be nice to have full- screen, high-definition video coming up on searches because this can make a massive difference to the user experience," he says.
Contactmusic.com: made sure images were searchable
Image ads are already used in Google's contextual ad network, for example, but there is no evidence to suggest that this is at the top of Google's short-term agenda
Warren Cowan, Greenlight
Copyright Haymarket Business Publications Ltd. Apr 2008
(c) 2008 Revolution. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.
Source: Revolution
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