What Wins In Google Universal Search? Videos, Images & Google!
Searchmetrics has conducted a data analysis on what type of content appears most often in Google Universal Search results, as well as which sites are most visible in them. Video and image content wins, as does content hosted on Google’s own properties. Universal Search Loves Video, Images The most revealing data from the study, which the […]
Searchmetrics has conducted a data analysis on what type of content appears most often in Google Universal Search results, as well as which sites are most visible in them. Video and image content wins, as does content hosted on Google’s own properties.
Universal Search Loves Video, Images
The most revealing data from the study, which the company provided to us and which may appear on its site soon, is that having a video is one of the best ways of showing up in the top results at Google.
The chart below shows up videos are by far the most found results in Google, with image content a distant second:
After video and image content are map results, news, books, shopping, images and then blogs.
The key point here, if you want to be seen in Google Universal Search, do video!
Google Wins In Universal Search
Searchmetrics also sent the top US based properties that come up under each universal search vertical:
As you can see from this chart, content hosted by Google clearly dominate, ranking tops in four of the five areas:
- YouTube is the number one video site that shows up for video results
- Google Maps is the number one map site that shows up for map results.
- Google Product Search is the number one shopping site that shows up for shopping results
- Google’s Blogger is the number one image site that shows up for image results.
The top rankings will likely raise rumblings about Google favoring itself, an issue in the anti-trust reviews that it is currently undergoing.
How Is Universal Search Defined?
This study defines the universal search results as the sections in the Google search results that read “News for…” or “Shopping results” or “Places for” or “Images for” and so on. The reason Google News is not dominating the news category, Searchmetrics says, is because the URLs in the “News for…” are URLs to the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and other news sites. Very rarely does Google have a link to a news article on their own domain name, at least at this point in time.
In terms of local search, Searchmetrics says that the data is drawn from searches related to large metro areas in the United States and would only be valid in those types of areas.
Correction: Our initial edition of this story had mistakenly reported the video line as the blog line (IE, said that blog content was most popular).
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