Are you trying to optimize your business for search? I hope your priority will be Google. It’s time you go beyond Google and get vertical. When it comes to optimizing your business website and growing steadily, start thinking about optimizing it for vertical search too. Unlike the most common and popular search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, Vertical Search Engines (VSEs) are specific to a particular topic or focus. These specialized search sites (Amazon, Trip Advisor, YouTube, Pinterest, eBay, Etsy, Airbnb etc) will help you to get your business information easily found to the users.
With the popularity of smartphones and the sharp increase in its usage has resulted in Vertical search to rise steadily. So whether you’re looking for business services, products or information, or an ideal place to advertise, vertical search sites can benefit your company. If you want to how can you make the best use of Vertical Search Engines, this blog will help you.
Vertical Search Engine- Let’s get more specific
Most of the search professionals cannot think about a search engine beyond Google. But, strategically thinking an alternative search engine is extremely industry-specific and closely related to a niche. Therefore, they are accurate and only provide what you’re searching for rather than scanning through hundreds of search results you’ll get from a mainstream search engine.
1. Content Personalisation
When you think about the huge number of blogs and articles you have submitted in different platforms to come up on Google, the opportunity is wide with vertical search engines to get your landing pages, resources and blogs to thrive.
If you’re a marketer, it makes sense when you were urging for personalisation in content. It has in fact lead to fragmentation resulting in more specific searches and queries and thus, leading to the success of vertical search.
2. Indexing By Category
The vertical search engines usually index by category and deliver results to search users accordingly. Since the indexing is more focused, there is a great likelihood that searchers find exactly what they want. Like in Google, Yahoo or Bing, your content won’t get as lost in the shuffle. And, this doesn’t mean that you should abandon all your efforts to get ranked high in Google or other popular general search engines. But, whatever you do to get indexed in Vertical search engines appear in Google’s or other horizontal search engines organic search results.
3. Marketing Spend Utilization
When determining how and where to spend your search engine marketing dollars, the choice for vertical and general search engines comes as a question. Google maybe your best bet if you want to sell a general consumer product. But if you’re looking for highly targeted consumers, obviously, go for vertical. With Vertical, you’re sure to get a more relevant user with a much higher chance of conversion rate and a better return on your investment. Unlike the general search engines, the number of general users’ traffic will be lower for vertical with very many highly qualified users.
How you should deal with Vertical Search Optimization (VSO)?
Keeping all the above things in mind, I have a few recommendations with regard to what you should do for Vertical Search Optimization (VSO) below:
● Conduct market research
Doing market research is essential when you want to identify your target customers on popular vertical search engines (the choice of search engines should be specific to your industry).
● Engage & attract them with relevant content
Once you know on which Vertical Search Engines are your target customers are most engaged, formulate a marketing strategy by integrating these platforms. Create relevant content and share it on these platforms. Keep a watchful eye on analytics to understand the engagement rate of the users.
● Use Open Graph Tags or Structured Data
To get your business or web page content to be found on Vertical Search Engines you may better use open graph tags or structured data. OG or Open Graph Tags are snippets of code that control how URLs are displayed when shared on social media such as FB, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. While, structured data make your content or information to look organised, analysed and to be captured easily. If you have too much information to share structured data brings inherent benefits.
● Run Test Ads
If you have specially allocated budget to spend on Verticals, create and test ads on these platforms.
● Learn the tricks to integrate or index
You can either let your chosen Vertical Search Engines get your business website indexed or research on how to best integrate with these search engines.
● Create niche-specific content
When you want your business to get indexed and quickly displayed to your users, don’t be afraid to create content that is detailed yet specific to the niche interests of your target customers.
Conclusion
Consumer demands constantly vary, and as marketers, you need to look at every vertical for new opportunities to build the business. While search engines still rely on contextual signals to filter through their vast index of content, Vertical Search Engines offer new possibilities to optimize your website for better users’ experience.
Content marketing will remain at the core of any successful SEO Campaign. But you’ll have to ensure that your content can be served to your audience, across any search engine or social network.
If you’re a little more passionate about delivering what your customers are looking for, apart from doing regular SEO tricks, do some homework on how to index for Vertical Search Engines too. To grow as a professional you need to boost your SEO skill.SEO professionals have a very bright future and you need to keep up with the latest trend in the field.
Shahista Tabassum is a senior IT Trainer who has extensive work experience of 9 years with Time Training Center Abu Dhabi. She has worked for 5 years as a software engineer and 4 years as an IT Trainer.
She spends most of her free time learning new technologies and keeps her interest in Arts and Drawing.