Go vertical when it comes to search marketing

Posted by: Jenny Bachner, Media Specialist

While many people turn to Google, Yahoo or MSN for their answers, others are moving to a more specialized form of search – vertical search.

Vertical search, or “specialized” search as some call it, is a form of internet search based on engines that focus on specific content. With regular search engines, web crawlers scan mass amounts of data to bring back general information about your topic of interest. However, when you have a specific question, and you are typically looking for the most direct answer, there’s no need to go hunting around on Google. Take the direct route and use a vertical search engine for your hunt. Vertical search web crawlers only crawl a highly refined database of information that is specific to your topic of interest.

Vertical search is particularly relevant in the business world, as terminology becomes very specific industry-to-industry. A marketer for example, looking up information on “abandonment” wouldn’t receive valuable information on the topic using a general search engine; however, using a vertical search engine, she would be able to quickly learn that abandonment is not “the act of giving something up,” but rather an interactive marketing term referring to the drop off during the process of conversion. For the marketer, vertical search engines represent a target audience that a search engine like Google just can’t deliver through regular search.

Here are some examples:

General B2B

Industrial

Technology