Leveraging Universal and Blended Mobile Search Results

The top three search engines for both mobile and traditional Web content are Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. These three search engines all have a primary index, where they keep records of most of the content on the Web, but they also have other indexes for special types of content, such as business listings, images, videos, and news. In both mobile and traditional searches, the search engines will mix information from their other indexes with the traditional listings. In the SEO community, these are called blended results because they blend results for a variety of different indexes.

Blended results are actually quite common in mobile search because the search engines are trying to minimize the number of clicks it takes a searcher to get to the information needed. They try to anticipate what type of result the searcher is looking for. For example, when someone searches for "California Pizza Kitchen," the search engines will probably think they are looking for a specific restaurant location and return results from the local index with addresses and phone numbers before providing traditional links to Web pages.

Similarly, if you search for a movie title that is currently in the theaters, the search engines will direct you to listings for local theaters and the show times for the movie you searched for, before providing you traditional website links. The blended elements can appear at the top of the page, or mixed in with other results lower on the page. They might also include links to movie reviews, and YouTube clips of the movie trailer, but can also include images, news articles, or product listings.

Different tactics are used for ranking well in the blended results. Universal search results are pulled into traditional search results pages based on their rank and relevance in the specific index, such as Google News or Yahoo! Images. If you rank well in those searches, it is much more likely that your content—images, videos, local listings, news, or anything else—will be pulled in the blended results from traditional or mobile search.

Universal search results are included in mobile search results at a different rate, based on the handset that submits the query. Although optimizing your website for universal search results and mobile universal search results adds to the work you have to do to optimize your website for mobile and blended searches, there are clear benefits. Blended results are usually much more visual than traditional search results, and they include things such as star rankings and video or image previews. These are eminently more clickable than a traditional Web listing in a search result. It is also generally easier to rank well for specific keywords in the specific indexes because fewer websites are competing there.

Ranking well in blended search results can be a particularly appealing strategy because fewer websites are competing for rankings in the type-specific indexes than in the overall Web index. The following example illustrates this point quite well.

If you were marketing the movie Ice Age 3, if you do a search for "Ice Age," you would see the number of possible Google results for the various indexes as follows:

Google Web Results: 92,500,000 results Google Images: 16,100,000 results Google Video: 27,300 Google News: 10,185 results Google Movie Listings: 40 results

Top-ranking items from each of these indexes showed on the first page of search results for the search term "Ice Age," despite the comparatively low threshold of competition in the different indexes.They were top results from the various indexes, pulled into the first page of Web-at-large search results. Ranking well in universal results is a bit like cutting in line; when you are ranked well in the smaller index, you are automatically put into the top listings in the big index. Many articles and tutorials have been written about ranking well in blended search results on the traditional Web, and for now, those tactics are basically the same for the mobile Web. A brief overview of important strategies is included below that cover local results, business listings as well as news, image and video results.

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