I know that you are not supposed to give away the answer in the first paragraph but I will anyways, yes and no. Working at a Search Engine Marketing firm, I have fielded numerous questions from clients and employees regarding how is Universal Search going to affect campaigns. So I have decided to address this in a post for the masses.

The first thing that people need to do is perform searches to see what comes up. You will notice that many search terms are relatively, if at all, affected by universal search. As a matter of fact, I have yet to see a product search result show up within the organic results outside of the Onebox. So not even product search has been affected. Where I am seeing the most change is when doing searches on people, places, news events, pop culture stuff, etc. So if you type “Steve Jobs” into Google you will see Google News results, YouTube results, and News Archive results all imbedded within the organic Web results.

So let’s assume that currently Google is showing these Universal results for some of your keywords. If you click on a Video Search result for one of your videos, you can either watch the video right there within the SERP without leaving the page, or you can click to go to YouTube.com to view it. Let’s assume that you click on an Image Search result, it takes you to Google Image Search and a quite awkward looking page. Now try clicking on a News Search result, it takes you to the news site that posted the article. Basically none of these Universal Search results will take visitors to your site, they simply drive the organic traffic to the various Google vertical properties, and of course more Google advertising.

So optimizing for the Universal Search results will not help drive more traffic to, or conversions for, your site. What optimizing for Google Universal Search can do for your business is build branding and hopefully take up valuable page real estate. If you are ranked in the top 5 for any of your search terms, and have an Image of yours ranked for that same term, and have a video ranked for that term, then you have now taken up 4 out of the 10 available organic spots on the page! This is not easy though, and will take a lot of work and dedication. It is not as easy as just optimizing your images and video. The images and video need to be deemed “relevant” to Google, and need to be used in a relevant manner on your site and probably others as well, for the search term. No one is quite yet sure how far Google is going to go with this and how Google is going to determine what search terms are going to get served up vertical results. But at least everyone is now realizing that they need to have their images and video properly optimized for.