Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business Strategy, Revised and Updated

THE EVOLUTION OF ORGANIC SEARCH RESULTS: BEYOND WEB PAGES

Originally, search engines indexed text on web pages and matched text-based searches to that content. As the Web evolved, search engines began looking at ways to catalog the new types of content on web pages, such as video and images. They created “vertical” indices that enabled searchers to look specifically for images, for instance. However, search engines found that few searchers noticed these vertical indices and that most searchers looked for everything from the main search page.

In 2007, Google introduced universal search, a new way of compiling results that blended content from all of their indices, including textual web content, images, videos, news, and product listings.11 The other major search engines soon implemented their own versions of “blended search” and today, it’s common to see all of these things appearing together in search results (Figure 5.6).

Figure 5.6 Google Multimedia Search Results

Source: Google Search

This blending provides opportunity for site owners. Now, in addition to listing your textual content, you can showcase your multimedia content as well.

When searchers see blended results, they view the page in a slightly different way than when the results are text only. Look at this eye-tracking heat map from Enquiro Research (Figure 5.7).

Figure 5.7 Eye-Tracking Heat Map: Multimedia Results ...