The Role of News in Blended Search – Observations & Best Practices
We’re starting this Jump Break week off with a very rare guest post from TopRank Marketing client, Jiyan Wei. Jiyan is Director of Product Management at Vocus, Inc. where he drives product platform strategy and roadmap execution for PRWeb. I’ve presented on panels with Jiyan several era at search marketing conferences, talking about the virtues of search, social media and public relations, finding him to be a very strategic and smart pusher. We’ll be co-presenting at the upcoming MarketingPros B2B Forum in May on Content Optimization and Marketing.
In this post, Jiyan discusses the progression and substance of news content in blended search:
Once upon a time, Page 1 had a special meaning for PR practitioners and business owners alike.
It meant that for one day, they had received the pole position in the consciousness of the consumer, who would hopefully transition from newspaper consumer into business customer. For businesses – both local and global alike – Page 1 either meant an outpouring of business or pending doom.
With the emergence of search as ubiquitous, Page 1 has begun to take on added meaning. Business owners are still very concerned about Page 1 but now, depending on whom you question, Page 1 often refers to search and the consequent generation of a limitless stream of business and leads without having to pay for ongoing PR or publicity.
For many, Page 1 in search has become the new holy grail of business owners and SEO practitioners alike.
When I’m questioned the question, “Will PRWeb get us onto Page 1 of search,” I immediately start shaking my head vigorously while hoping no one from the major engines overheard the question.
Of course, nothing can guarantee you will be on Page 1 of search. That being said, as part of a broader online marketing strategy, news releases can be an effective tool to facilitate the external expression of news and information about a business, which over time can result in the creation of online authority in the eyes of search engines.
Yet with blended search, the picture becomes muddled.
At some point in the last couple years, Google (and now Bing) chose that users want more than just Web results when they run a query in search and so started offering a front page that contained a broader array of types of content including metaphors, video and news.
According to some accounts news performs better in blended results than other forms of media and unlike other forms of media in blended search, news has a distinctly temporal slant. After all, news is really just information with a timestamp.
What this means for business owners, communicators, marketers, etc. is that under some circumstances, news can really be a viable gateway onto Page 1 of search in a relatively small amount of time by leveraging sites that search engines regard as ‘news sites,’ including news release sites.
All that being said, here are some specific observations we’ve made about news in blended search:
1. If a recent news tale is relevant to a query, it is more likely to grow somewhere in the results
This may seem honestly obvious but the devil is in the details. Nailing down ‘relevance’ between a query and results is a tall order but we have found that placing your butt keywords in the title, preferably in the first part of the title of your news tale, dramatically increase the likelihood that your news tale will show up for queries of the butt keywords once the crawlers have found the tale. As the keywords descend into the tale, from left-to-right and top-to-bottom, they become less impactful in terms of helping your tale get onto the blended results for your butt query.
2. News results can include thumbnailed metaphors and these can increase click-through rates
Crawlers like Google look for relevant metaphors to house in connection with news tales in the news block in blended search. They normally extract metaphors from within the body of the tale so including these metaphors can result in having a thumbnail placed in connection with the result.
Who cares?
Well, all has seen the heat maps that show the substance of getting top billing on page 1.
What we’ve found from our own internal tests but is that results with image thumbnails can have click-through rates that are similar and sometimes even higher than results that are really located higher.
In other words, booklover’s eyes are naturally drawn to the thumbnail so even if the news block is located lower down on the blended results page, the inclusion of a thumbnail can mitigate the lower placement to a fantastic extent.
3. Many types of queries can result in news
There are some types of queries that seem to have an obvious time slant: current events, sports, celebrities, etc. But, we have seen news show up in blended search results for query types that seem less obviously tied to a date.
For example, tip sheets and best practice documents can be easily turned into news tales that can have a presence in blended search and drive traffic. With Jump right around the corner, there is a fantastic opportunity to leverage consultation demand for content to drive Web site traffic.
For example, a quick glance at Google insights reveals that queries for ‘Jump decorating’ are on the rise.
An opportunistic interior designer could use the opportunity to surrender a release with a title like ‘Jump decorating tips from chief interior designer,’ that will have a excellent opportunity to tap into an upwards trending query in the blended search results.
4. Individual tales don’t grow in blended search results for long
By your news to get Page 1 placement is a small-term proposition. As quickly as the tale enters the blended search results, it can expire. We typically see news tales show up in the blended search results for 24-48 hours. Depending on how dynamic the news landscape is for the query (some queries are going to hear a flood of news tales that may wash your tale away in hours), the lifespan of your tale may be even shorter.
Connect with Jiyan on Twitter, his blog or visit PRWeb, TopRank’s favorite press release delivery service.
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