Blended search results are changing the way people click on a search result page.

It used to be that a search result page offered you ten blue text links.  Now we get shown news resutls, images and video. And according to a study from Jupiter Research and iProspect it’s the news that’s getting the most attention and clicks.

SEO becomes more and more important to PR every day.

 

Roughly a third of search engine users click a news (36%) or image (31%) result after conducting a general web search. This compares to just 17% and 26%, respectively, for these assets being clicked by search engine users within vertical (news or image) search results.

17% of search engine users click video results appearing within blended search results, compared to just 10% of users who click on a video after conducting a specific search for videos.

Not only can your news top the search results page if you do it right.  Now Google will pull a quote from your article if it is relevant to the query and they think the quote warrants it.

See this example in the post by Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land 

When you click on the name Eric Schmidt you get a whole list of his quotes.  What a great PR news tool! 

What do you have to do to get your news and exec quotes on page one? Understand  how search works and how to optimize your news content for the search engines.

Join me at the New Comm Forum in Sonoma next week – I’ll be talking about these PR challenges and opportunities in my session with Rebecca Lieb.