Does your website ready after a pretty cool design, perfect usability structure and better call to action. Sounds good for at least all most everyone. So what next? You would probably start optimizing it for big guys. (Google, Yahoo and Live). But take a breath here! You are the one who need to come out from the traditional search engine optimization strategies and look beyond the standalone methods. Do you need a very relevant traffic which will converts more compared with traditional search engine referral traffic. Then you need to look into vertical search.
What is vertical search: Vertical search engines also called specialized search engines crawls and covers specific industry sector such as travel, consumer retailer or business vertical. Alternatively vertical search engines may focus on a particular type of media like video, audio, images, blog content, news etc. You can have a comprehensive list of vertical search engines here.
Users just wanted to get the search results to be very accurate and at least to be more relevant for their search term. Horizontal search engines like Google and Yahoo displays more general search results along with the related search results which frustrates the user. Here comes the vertical search engines, which send their spiders on highly refined database so user can find only relevant information, closely related to their specific term.
Say for Example,Search result for a query “Voice Recognition Software” lists more relevant searches in business.com whereas in Google.com we get some relevant results as well as generic results.
According to a case study from ClearGauge, Google drove more than twice the clicks of Business.com, however Business.com, a vertical search focused on business services, generated 60 percent more conversions at 1/5 the cost. Courtesy: www.dmnews.com
According to the Vertical Search (B2B) Report 2009, published by Econsultancy, is based on an online survey and more than 500 media and internet professionals participated out in October and November 2008. The below chart speaks the truth about the vertical search engines comparatively with the traditional horizontal search engines.
You might not get a huge volume of traffic from vertical search engines as like Google, Yahoo but in terms of ROI the traffic from vertical search converts more rather than horizontal search since the traffic is more relevant and the results seems to be more accurate. So the bottom line is keep your marketing mix balanced with both traditional search engines and vertical search engines.
Disclaimer: The post is completely based on individual thoughts and SEO Services Group bears no responsibilities for the thoughts reflected in the post.
Finally someone who can write a good blog ! . This is the kind of information that is useful to those want to increase their SERP’s.
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