Joint comScore & RankAbove Webinar on Blended Search and the News Rules of Engagement

Blended Search and the New Rules of Engagement
Eli Goodman & Eli Feldblum
October, 14 2010

Our Presenters
Eli Feldblum
CTO & Co-Founder
RankAbove
Eli Goodman
Search Evangelist
comScore, Inc.

comScore Customer Knowledge Platform:
A granular 360 view of the multitude of online activities of 2MM global users
Designed to be representative of the total online population.
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About RankAbove
RankAbove optimizes rich media, builds video site maps, consults on search engine optimization, and provides business intelligence software.
RankAbove is a software and professional services firm specializing in large scale SEO for major brands and corporations that have websites with tens of thousands of pages.
RankAbove's Drive business intelligence software lets you dig deeper into information already at your fingertips: do competitive analysis, run reports, and make predictions based on past performance. Drive saves corporations time and money while increasing ROI from natural search traffic. Put your business in Drive.

Agenda
What is Blended Search?
Blended Search Statistics
Totals
Engines
Growth
Click-Through Rates
Rich Media
How Does Google Treat Rich Media?
How Do Users Treat It?
What Can It Do For Your Business?
How Do You Do It?

* Source: SEOSOS Blog, Wordpress
Blended search, also known as “Universal Search” or “Search 3.0,″ is incorporating results from non-web sources (like books, videos and images) into the regular web search results.

How Often Do We See Blended Results on the Big 3 Engines?
Source: comScore Custom Analytics
1/3 of all Searches displayed a Blended Result
33%

How Does Blended Search Differ by Search Engine?
Source: comScore August 2010
(MM)
33%
Over 50% of all Bing searches came back with Blended Results!
Google’s % YOY is down from 40% in August 10

What are The Top 5 Most Common Blended Results?
Total Pages containing each category in August 2010
1.4 B
Source: comScore Custom Analytics, August 2010

What are the Fastest Growing Types of Blended Results?
229%

Click-Through Rates – Blended vs. Non Blended
Pages with Blended Results = 101% Click-Through Rate *
Pages with no Blended Results = 110% Click-Through Rate *
Why?
*Searchers clicking on multiple results from their 1 search = 100% + CTR

Click-Through Rates – Pages with Blended Results
Certain Types of Blended Results do not require Clicks
Lowest Click-Through Rates per Pages Displayed
Stocks – 66%
Maps – 73%
Dictionary/Def/Answer – 80%
Highest Click-Through Rates per Pages Displayed
Shopping – 126%
Local – 107%
Real Time Results – 107%

Does the Presence of Shopping Blended Results Impact the Paid Search Click-through Rate?
Source: comScore August 2010
Overall Paid Click-Through Rate: 9.2%
Overall Paid Click-Through Rate when a blended result of any kind is displayed: 8.7%
Overall Paid Click-Through Rate when no blended result is displayed: 9.3%
Paid Click-Through Rate when “Shopping” Blended Results are displayed: 27%
Not all Blended Results are created equally. Different strategies for different types of campaigns…

Rich Media – It Does Make a Difference
Video viewers are 20% more likely to make a purchase online
Buyers per visitor vs. video viewer
20%
21%
22%
22%
22%

Agenda
Blended Search Statistics
Totals
Engines
Growth
Click-Through Rates
Rich Media
How Does Google Treat Rich Media?
How Do Users Treat It?
What Can It Do For Your Business?
How Do You Do It?

Search Engines Love Rich Media

Google Gives Rich Media An Unfair Advantage

Users Love Rich Media Too
Blended Results Garner Much Higher Click-Through Rates Than Regular Results

Users Especially Love Images & Video
CTR
19%
18%
12%

Image Results are Amazing, Sometimes

Video Drives Click-Through Rates
Across all positions, video results with thumbnails generate higher CTRs

Video Especially Help Results in Lower Positions

Video Works Even Better With Google Instant
Video Traffic up 28% across the board!

Which Would You Click?
CollegeHumor formatted its videos so that Google understood they were videos.
Once they did, and thumbnails began being displayed in the SERPS,
CTRs went way up.
After all, which would you click?
Vs.

Post-Click Engagement
Video Users stay on the site longer, visit more pages, bounce less often—and even buy more!

How to Add Content
Video
People like videos; they are good for eCommerce sites too, not just content
Create video content
Create & Submit a Video Sitemaps
Mark up videos with microformats to let the Search Engines know they are vidoes
Pictures
Pictures benefit some sites, not all
Make sure there is a reason to see the next photo
News
Submit site to Google News
Products
Submit data feed to Google Base

How to Optimize Rich Media Content
Video
Make sure your sitemaps and/or microformats are correct.
Make sure your URLs are not too long
Your videos must be family-friendly
Choose a good thumbnail
You need textual content too: transcripts, tags, titles, comments, translation, etc…
Regular SEO for the page
Use multiple navigational paths: hierarchical, folksonomic& supplemental
Images
Alt tag, image name, title and content on the page around the image
Add more data: EXIF, tags, context, captions and more
Others
Correct formats
Keep track of new blends, like episodes

What Does the Future Look Like?
www.rankabove.com

RankAbove Data Sample
RankAbove Looked at 10 Sites Over Six Months. Monthly, We Analyzed:
150MM+ Visits from SEO
20MM+ Video Hits from SEO
100K+ Image Hits from SEO
1MM+ Keywords
100K Tracked Rankings

Thank you!
Eli Goodmanegoodman@comscore.com@LosBuenosEli Feldblumeli@rankabove.com

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Joint comScore & RankAbove Webinar on Blended Search and the News Rules of Engagement

by RankAbove on Oct 17, 2010

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Joint comScore & RankAbove Webinar on Blended Search and the News Rules of Engagement — Presentation Transcript