I do hate the phrase “digital assets”. It reminds me of the incredibly boring business accounting term “fixed assets” which I had to get a client to rank for for the past year and a half.  But I digress. Whatever you wanna call it – universal search, vertical search, blended search – the fact is that videos, local listings, images, shopping results, news results and a growing list of others, continue to increase in importance in Google’s SERP land-grab.  Often ranking #1 only gets you halfway down the page and this session is all about making use of those blended results to grab more of that SERP.  Here we go…

 

Rob Sheppard – Ask Jeeves

Rob represents Ask.com which was the first to implement universal search amongst the search engines.  He starts by stating he’s not an SEO expert so won’t be going into the optimisation stuff much himself. Fair enough. iving an overview behind the concept of including non-text / non-standard results in the search – they found that their users really liked them – more relevance for some queries, freshness and variety of content.

While universal means there’s less space for your regular rankings to show up, there’s also more opportunities for added visibility. He shows examples from Google, Yahoo and Ask for the query “how to mend a bicycle puncture”.  All use video results on the SERP, all from sites like Videojug.  He says a key issue to deal with is the fact that very few authoritative sources of video keep showing up.  He then looks at an election SERP, looking at results for Brown, Cameron and Clegg in Google, Ask and Bing all of which show a variety of different universal results, including biographies, news, images, video etc.

He talks about why users like universal search – this is based on polling and user data of Ask’s searchers.

How can I make the most of opportunities from Universal Search? He goes through the standard basics: upload to the big sites that actually get shown (youtube, Videojug, etc), use RSS feeds to your content,

There are a pile of text heavy notes in the slides – hopefully these will be available later and you’ll be able to see it for yourself.

Social media sites are taking universal search from a ‘nice to have’ to a standard feature of SERPS

Key tip: we believe the most important factor in search is answering questions.  So always try and answer questions in your content – look at Q&A sites like Yahoo Answers, etc

Question from the floor: if you have lots of videos and a video sitemap, should you also upload them to Youtube to get them ranked in Ask Jeeves? Rob answers that if you have thousands of videos it’s probably not worth it; we’ll try to find the content on your site.  But it’s definitely a good idea to be visible on youtube as well.  

 

Ian Strain-Seymour – Bazaarvoice

Ian is going to talk about ‘customer voice’.  He asks who knows what this means, a few reluctant hands go up.  It sounds like a fancy word for ‘reviews’ to me

What is the voice of a customer:

• authentic conversations
• you and the customer
• B2B with supplier
• engineered fake conversations between shill accounts set up by marketers (OK, he didn’t really say that, I made it up – just checking you’re still paying attention)

He talks about customer reviews in microformats.  They’re still in very early days and its worth getting into from this stage if you have reviews on your site.  He displays the reviews shown up from a search for “nikon d5000“.

He then mentions using realtime search. “If you have a strong following in social media, put out questions to them about your products and let Google do the hard work”.

To be honest I’m losing motivation to keep up with covering this talk.  He’s basically saying “look at this, you should do it too”, speaking very fast and not really adding much we don’t already know IMO.  At one point he said “if you don’t understand you’re welcome to leave the room”.  I think this was a joke, but no-one laughed. As far as I know, no-one left the room either.

A Question about twitter leads to a gem from Rob Kerry: some people are trying out leaving HTML links in twitter streams – sites that have twitter streams on their sites then conver these into links! Awesome.

 

(someone) – SundaySky

Sorry, I didn’t catch this dude’s name – he is a replacement speaker from the guy billed to speak.  He starts by looking at heatmaps on universal SERPs and the fact that videos in blended results attract people and get more clickthroughs.  Has anyone not seen this already?

He mentions that getting a video result improves your chances of ranking well – I’m not sure if he’s suggesting that if your youtube video ranks in universal search there is a knock on effect on your standard result… have submitted it as a question but would be interested to know if anyone has found this.

He looks at an example of Overstock.com using video content on their product pages.  Goes through some tips for using video content:

• Each video should have its own URL
• Submit a video sitemap with compelling thumbnails – don’t leave it up to google to choose your thumbnails
• Keep video section as frequently updated as possible
• Add as much video content as you can – more = better chance of ranking
• Have a dedicated videos section on your site

My question got asked re whether he is saying that having a Youtube video indexed actually helps your standard organic result.  He says his gut feeling is yes

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