SEM Blog

What Is Vertical Search?

Posted by Bryan at April 11th, 2008

Not performing a general search? Then perhaps Google and Yahoo aren’t the places you should be looking. I know what you’re thinking, not using Google or Yahoo? But when you’re looking for specialized information, such as a job search or housing search, you would want to use a Vertical Search Engine. With the mounds of data that those two major search engines would spit back out at you if you tried to search for those options directly on there, using a vertical search engine like SimplyHired.com for job hunting or ZIPVO.com to find the perfect home, would provide you with results that wouldn’t be cluttered with irrelevant information.

Google and Yahoo send out their spider to retrieve and index information from all of the web. A vertical search engine however, has it’s own specific database that it uses to pull up information from. Instead of this being a dangerous concept for the world of online marketing, it has actually proven to be very powerful. After using the vertical search engine, a user will get information more relevant to what they’re looking for, which means higher conversion and click-through rate for the businesses that advertise on those search engines. As opposed to Google Adwords and Paid Search Listings, you’re not selecting a series of terms and relevance to advertise on, because the site you’re advertising on is already specifically aimed at your businesses niche.

Depending on the type of site, advertising can range from a listing for a used guitar for sale on Gear-Vault.com to a banner advertisement for Justin Williams, mortgage broker from Prosperity Mortgage, under a real estate listing on ZIPVO.com. Your target audience will view your advertisement less as an add and more like a resource that is completely relevant to their search.

By no means am I saying avoid the major search engines and just use this. That would be like Toyota choosing to only advertise in car magazines.

Here’s a list of some popular vertical search engines that Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Watch has put together.