SEO - Going vertical
Specialized search engines, increasingly called vertical search engines, send crawlers to specific databases that contain information about a particular topic. Vertical search engines help to increase the number of eyeballs that see your new product and can help to reveal the searchers motivations. When someone searches for a microchip they could be looking for technical specs, how-to-tips, etc. but when that same user searches for a microchip on a shopping search engine, their intent becomes much clearer.
So what are some of the vertical search engines for Microchip’s products? There are new ones added each day, but here are a few:
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Each engine is different so how do you optimize for each one? There’s no one-size-fits-all approach that will work. The good news is that we have high-quality, vertical content on our website, which helps crawlers find the right information. Additionally, there are a fewthings you can do:
1)Realize that your content will get picked up and re-used by vertical search engines. For example, the product descriptions are re-used like this on the alibaba.com site:
Therefore, make sure your most popular keywords and differentiating factors are listed in the first sentence or two of your description.
2)Follow-up. After you’ve launched a new product, check the search engines and directories to make sure your product is visible.
3)Know that user generated content and star ratings are a component of search results. The more positive reviews the better. Reviews and ratings create additional relevant content associated to your products, and can provide deeper descriptions by a 3rd party authority. This functionality doesn’t seem to have reached the vertical search engines for our industry, but you can bet it is coming. When it does, you can increase your product presence by asking a 3rd party to review your new product.
Get in Directories
In general, the difference between a vertical search engine and a directory is that a search engine is wholly-automated and technology-based, whereas a directory is edited and touched by humans. Also, directories usually charge for listing your products on their site. Directories can be particularly important for focusing on a particular geography or technology segment. For example, the buy.ecplaza.net directory allows users to refine their search by geography (in the left nav) and because it’s a “shopping” directory you can infer that the intention of the users is closer to “buying” than just doing research.
Additionally, the Asian net directory focuses on the Asian market. While this isn’t a great directory, you can see how some directories in our industry are developing with a focus on a specific geography.
MarCom can help you evaluate promotion opportunities on directories by looking at how much you’d pay for the value (cost per number of visitors/buyers) and the general visibility.
**we don’t appear to be listed in this search engine (yet) but they do pick up our news/press releases.