I’ve often joked to audiences that I can get them a #1 search result for their Web site as long as they let me pick a search term obscure enough. I can get the top spot, but it won’t actually bring them any business because no one searches for that term. But search engines so rarely agree on #1 results, that you may actually have it within your reach for valuable search terms. If you typically use the same search engine for all your searches, it might surprise you to learn that search engines rarely agree on what the top results are. What’s more, that trend will only accelerate as time goes on. If search engines don’t provide the same answer to the same question, how can that be good for a search marketer? Read on.
First, let’s understand what the search study, released last month, really says. Out of almost 20,000 searches studied, the top four search engines agreed on the top result less than 4% of the time, and never once agreed on all top three results (regardless of the order of those results). Just four years ago, the search engines agreed on the top result nearly twice as often.
So what does this mean to a search marketer?
At the very least, it means you have more chances to win. If you think about each #1 result for a search term as having one winner, you have more winners when the search engines disagree. If you already have the #1 result in Google, this is bad news for you, but most of us don’t, so it provides hope.
Obviously, not all #1 results are created equal—you’d rather have the top result in Google, who handles 50% of all searches, than in Ask.com, which tops out around 3%. But it’s better to have the #1 result for 3% of the searches than for none. What this survey is saying is that more sites have a chance for top rankings than you might think.
More interesting than the fact that results differ is why they differ. Obviously, differences in each search engine’s relevance ranking formula is a big factor, but sometimes the engines differ just because they have indexed different content. If one search engine favors more video results than another, then videos have a better chance of breaking through on that search engine. This aspect of search differences got a huge push when both Ask.com and Google went to integrated search results (Google calls it universal search) that inject many more kinds of content in the results, beyond the traditional list of Web pages. Blogs, podcasts, video, and more now dot the search results.
Search marketers would be wise to take advantage. If you can create really good answers to questions—very compelling content–you have a much better chance of breaking through now than ever before. The search results are more varied than ever and you can be the page at the top of some search engine somewhere.
In addition, personalized search is creeping up—at that point different searchers will have different results for the same search in the same search engine. Think about how many more chances there are for that top result.
Chris Anderson’s Long Tail caused search marketers to focus on more rare search terms in the quest to get top results. This study, and the trend to personalized search, shows that there is a long tail of searchers, too. Search results are becoming fragmented, favoring search marketers whose content is the perfect answer not just for a search term, but for a search term for a particular searcher in a particular search engine.
Search marketing is becoming less a winner-take-all business (get the #1 result for the popular term across all search engines) and becoming more a game of very targeted marketing. Is your search marketing strategy ready for the change?
