Universal Search – getting more visitors to your website!

Google has been using Universal Search for over two years, which means your website needs to be designed so it can be found by any search method your potential customer makes!

So you’ve got your head around the fact that obtaining high GooglePageRank is not available ‘on demand’ – i.e. it does not happen overnight and is dependent on creating ‘quality’ marketing strategies for ‘organic’ search engine optimisation over several months at least.

Before Google introduced Universal Search, word search results comprised of nothing else but other websites, but since May 2007, there has been no need to select a separate menu item because search results automatically bring back videos, blogs, images, news articles, and other media available online!

Your current online marketing campaigns should be optimised to put your site in front of as many visitors as possible searching across any number of today’s ‘advertising’ mediums. This now has to include social media, the single most important source of audience creation and sales potential, now ‘buzzing’ everywhere on the web.

One keyword phrase search covers everything!

When you optimise your website properly – yes, you will have to engage the services of a professional fulltime website design company who know what they’re doing! – the results from a search will be more comprehensive, giving a well-rounded picture, and including better information than would previously have been found in a search of just one type of media.

Now that broadband is universally available, internet users have the bandwidth to receive multiple types of media information – and of course, across mobile phone networks too.

A word of caution – irrelevant results can still be retrieved unless you have carefully researched, tested and implemented your main keyword phrases, so a search visitor receives your site because it’s ‘target-optimised’ exactly for what they’re looking to find.

Remember - there is no way to turn off Universal Search. A website now competes not only with other websites, but also with all the other media included in search results. This makes it difficult for Google to determine the relevance between different types of media, as opposed to simply comparing different web pages!

As you already know, Bing, Yahoo and Ask, amongst many others, now operate Universal Search too! So, if you haven’t done so already, you need to relook at your market sector, particular niche and target audience to determine the exact types of media which are the most important for your business – and make sure that they are available and fully keyword optimised for search engine indexing.