Google has made a major update to the way users can refine their searches.  It is now very easy to refine or filter out result that meet specific criteria.  Want to see only reviews from the past 24 hours?  No problem.

What opportunities does this change provide for SEO and marketing your website?  First, let’s understand how it works.

Here is where one can access this feature.  Do a Google search and on the results page click on “Show Options” just below the Google icon on the left.

The filter options are on the left side.  Just try them out to see how they effect your search results.

Dig deeper visually into the results using the Wonder wheel.

SEO Opportunities
After playing around with the filter you can see how useful this can be in getting more relevant results for the user.  It is also clear that different sites rank for the different filters.  It is probably rare to impossible for a single site to rank highly for each filter.  How can you optimize for all these different options?

The first step is simple.  For a given keyword, look at what is highly ranked for each filter.  Are there opportunities to create content that can be optimized for that filter?  The video filter is pretty straight forward.  Create a video with keywords in the title and desription at the minimum.  It has a good chance at high rankings.

Reviews
The “review” filter provides an opportunity to see what reviews rank highly.  See if it is possible to direct any customers to these sites to place reviews.  If your site provides reviews, there is a format to encode the review data to ensure the results can be displayed in a Google search result.  This is an easy way to gain visibility by updating your code.  Here are details that explain how to mark up structured data.

As you can see there are many ways to optimize for these filters.  Start working on this now, as it adds a whole additional dimension to optimizing a site.  It is only a matter of time before the average search engine user starts using this new feature.  In 2007 the average search query was only three words, now it is up to 4 words.  Users are becoming more sophisticated.  It is our job to stay ahead of the game.

Google video showing how to use the new “Options filter”

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 21st, 2009 at 1:46 pm and is filed under Risdall Advertising Agency Interactive, Risdall Marketing Group, Risdall Online Marketing Group. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.