Posted by adamf
When last I wrote, we had added the ability to see local universal search results along with your campaign rankings. I'm happy to let you know that we just launched an update that adds sitelinks, video, and photo results as well. Now you can get even better visibility into exactly how good that organic link position is, and see how well your universal and enhanced search results are helping you improve your presence and visibility in a SERP (search engine results page). Here's a quick walkthrough of this update.
Universal Overview Module
The first change you might notice on your ranking overview pages is a new module in the report header. Within this module, each universal result type is represented by an icon. This icon is followed by the number of times you appeared in a universal result block of that type and the total number of times that type of universal result was included for the keywords you track.
Below, in your rankings overview, you will now see these icons show up along with rankings in SERPs that include these types of universal results:
Image Results
Depending on your business, image results can be a great opportunity to surface your content or products in a way that grabs the searcher's attention. Image results are most commonly displayed as a horizontal block of 4 or 5 images in Google:
If one of the keywords you happen to be tracking includes an image result, you will see a little camera icon below the ranking. Hovering over the icon will show the detail for the local results:
If you drill down into the ranking detail, you will see the image results both in the history graph, and below, in the SERP detail:
Video Results
Video universal results often show up in a horizontal or vertical block embedded on a SERP. A horizontal block is embedded as its own content block and doesn't count toward organic ranking position:
Blocks of individual video results are another format that we've seen become much more common in Google results. If there is more than one result in this style, we consider this a universal block and do not count them in the natural results. In some cases, we do see just one video result included with the other rankings. In this case, we count the video result as a natural enhanced result, rather than a universal block.
Here's a great example of a SERP that has both a universal image block followed by a block of video results:
In the ranking history, this will appear like this:
Video Optimization Tips
If you are focused on making your video content more easily available to and visible on search engines, here is some good reading:
- A great post walking through how to set up your video sitemap: Video Sitemap Guide for Vimeo and YouTube
- An entertaining whiteboard Friday by our friend Danny Dover, including a cameo by Doc Brown!: Video SEO Basics
- More great technical detail and strategy for video SEO: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo
Sitelinks
Sitelinks are blocks of related links that show up as part of the first natural search result. These are most commonly displayed when the search keyword is associated with a branded company or organization name. For example, Google includes sitelinks with Seattle Children's Hospital's #1 result for the keywords "Seattle Children's" and "Seattle Children's Hospital".
As you can see, this sort of result is the most prominent presence in the search results, and not only contains links to key areas of the site, but in this case also includes a review and embedded local result. On your ranking history page, this result will look like this:
As you can see, we catch the local enhanced result but don't pick up ratings yet.
Sitelinks Optimization Tips
If you don't have sitelinks for your company name, or the elements in your sitelinks aren't targeting the most important areas of your site, here is some good reading:
- Google's own description of sitelinks gives a great overview and tips about how to help them discover the right content and name it correctly. Their key recommendation, "...for your site's internal links, make sure you use anchor text and alt text that's informative, compact, and avoids repetition." They also give instructions about how to demote inappropriate sitelinks via webmaster tools.
- This Q&A discussion has some good speculation about what Google algo likely considers when deciding whether to include sitelinks.
One More Important Note
Showing top organic ranking placement vs. top overall ranking placement
We have heard some confusion and occasional frustration of late about an update we made to ensure that we show top natural results in our rankings summary. We have always intended that the rankings we display represent the top natural results (which excludes universal results). The reason for this is that optimization for natural rankings is a different focus and process than for universal results. For a period of time, we had been including local results in this calculation, which pushed the natural results down. We made an update that corrected this a little over a week ago. While we heard relief from some people about getting the rankings they expected, we heard concern from others who saw their rankings appear to fall, since the position they were tracking was actually part of a local universal block. For this unannounced change, we apologize. You can still see that local ranking position in the ranking detail reports for these keywords, but not at the summary level.
This led us to the idea of another feature for the rankings section, so I thought I'd run it by you all. Rather than showing only natural ranking positions (excluding universal results) on the ranking overview page, we would offer three options:
- Show best natural ranking position (excludes universal results - as we do today)
- Show best universal ranking position (only shows universal placements, given the universal verticals that we track)
- Show best absolute organic ranking position (shows the best position, whether it is a natural rank, or in a universal block)
This would allow everyone to better focus in on the types of rankings they are most interested in optimizing for.
It may take a little time for us to get this in place, but let us know if you think you would use this feature; it would help us with prioritization. I've created a new feature idea in our feature request forum so that everyone can leave their comments and we can track them all there: https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/21226961-show-the-top-universal-ranking-position-and-top-overall-ranking-position-as-well-as-top-natural-rank
In Conclusion
Well, that's about it for this update. As always, please share your thoughts and let our help team know if you run into any problems. We are probably going to take a break from adding more universal result types in the near term to focus on some other improvements, but we will be listening. If there is another type of result you really want to see with your rankings, let us know. We will take your requests into account when we look at this again a little later this year. Please add your requests to the feature request forum, so others can see them and vote them up.
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