Posted by adamf
Now that the holidays have passed, we’re back in full swing at SEOmoz. I’m happy to offer another product announcement for PRO members. We’ve just shipped phase one of our support for Universal Search results, which includes data about local (a.k.a. places) results in Google search results. Whether it's a 7-pack or a blended result, if you care about local SERP results, it's often a pain to find out where you stand. We aim to help.
If you're not sure why visibility in blended or enhanced results are important, I highly recommend reading Dr. Pete's eye tracking study. His experiments nicely show that universal results that break up the page or results with enhanced elements can draw people's focus, even from strong organic results at the top of the page.
As I noted, this first phase rolls out local results for Google. In the coming weeks we plan to add other types of results, including video, images, shopping, news. We are also looking to incorporate site links (1-box results) at some point. We debated whether to wait until we had the other types of universal results in place before launching, but decided to ship in this limited fashion so we can get some feedback from all of you to help us make it better as we build more capabilities.
Here’s a quick rundown of what we've added:
See Which of Your Keywords Contain Local Results in the SERP
The first change you may notice is on the Ranking Overview page. If we saw a 7-pack or blended local result in the SERP for one of your keywords, you'll now see a small pushpin icons just below your ranking for that engine. There are two different states of the icon. If you are not in the universal result, you will just see the pushpin, but if you are included in the result, it will appear with happy little lines above it:
If you are in the competitive rankings view, you will see the vertical result show up in the column with your site's ranking.
A Quick Look at the Details
While in the overview, you can learn more about what is contained in the local result by hovering over the icon. This will offer up information including where the vertical is on the page, how many results it contains, and also a list of the results shown in the order presented:
More Information on the Rankings Detail Page
To see even more detail, click on the keyword or the "view ranking history for more details" link in the tooltip. Here, on the ranking details page, you will see universal results added to the ranking history graph, so you can see where universal results have been included over time and in which position (sorry, I don't yet have historical data for this sample campaign):
If you scroll further down, you will find the SERP overview, which includes blended and enhanced results alongside the organic results we saw in the SERP. As with organic results, your and your competitors' results will also be highlighted in color, so it's easy to get a feel for the overall visibility of you and your competitors on a search engine results page.
Here you can see a result where the local 7-pack pushes down what would normally look like a really strong #3 organic result below the fold:
Conversely, you can also see when you are dominant at the top of a SERP, which is common for branded terms:
For reference, here's what this looked like in the original SERP:
What's Up Next?
Our plans going forward are to push out support for more universal search types. Our order of priority at the moment is:
- Video
- Images
- Shopping
- News
- Site Links
We'd love to hear from you if you think this is out of order, or if there is a different type of result that you think is more important than the rest of these.
I’ll publish a quick follow-up post when new result types are added.
Please Let Us Know What You Think
As always, your feedback is greatly appreciated. If you have thoughts about how this could be better, please share a comment in the post or add a request in our feature request forum.
