A growing number of SEOs I talk to are focusing more and more of their attention on what I’ll call second search. If you’re keeping score at home, first search would basically be like Google’s traditional Web search engine. Second search refers to the opportunities that secondary or vertical search engines offer.
That is, as sites like Wikipedia, YouTube, Technorati, Flickr and the job search engines all provide their own search functionality – and get a lot of traffic – savvy marketers are learning to use them to their advantage, secondarily to traditional SEO. It’s basically, “Google’s too tough and crowded to fool anymore, so let’s go where the competition’s not as great.”
For example, do a search for “jobs” on Technorati, a popular blog search engine. Above all the posts, you’ll see a single job site promoted as a WTF, driving traffic to a site called Something Hire. (Yep, I’ve never heard of them either.)
Granted, Technorati search data isn’t available publicly (as far as I know, but I’m sure it’s coming), so there’s no telling how many times “jobs” is used in their queries, but the competition is almost zero and the only cost is time and a little creativity.
Such tactics are nothing new. For instance, eBay has been a secondary search engine for online sellers to leverage since I can remember. However, today’s combination of Google’s ever-perplexing algorithm, niche search engines being easier to manipulate and those results gaining more traction – don’t forget vertical search results are also making their way into Web search quite nicely (YouTube video results creeping into Google results ring a bell?) – is making this strategy one of growing popularity.
Are you optimizing for second search? Hmm, should that be SSEO or SEO 2.0?
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