How to set a keyword strategy for vertical search & measure its success

Over the last few years the search landscape has been redefined in a number of ways beginning with smartphones, continuing with smart electronics like Amazon’s Alexa or Google’s home devices, and subsequently voice search taking over for where desktop searches left off. Google announced in 2015 that searches on mobile have increased by about 57% over desktop and this trend has continued to grow through 2020. Speaking of 2020…

“On October 20, 2020, the Justice Department sued Google, an Alphabet subsidiary, claiming the company’s internet search platform is an illegal monopoly that is harmful to both competition and consumers. The case aims to prove that Google’s position as a dominant search provider limits consumer choice and partnerships with companies like Apple suppresses competition.”

Andrew Bocskocsky

Basically, Google is hard to trust because they don’t have a ton of competition and users are looking for other alternatives to find the best product/price/information for their time and money. This brings me to vertical search.

What is a vertical search?

Vertical search is the antithesis to horizontal search (Google) and focuses on specialized industries. For example, instead of searching Google for the cheapest flights out of San Francisco you would frequent a search engine like Expedia or Skyscanner. If you were looking for real estate you would search via Zillow, recipes via Pinterest, reviews via Reddit, investing advice via Quora, restaurant reservations via Open Table, ect.

So how do I begin a keyword strategy?

Keyword chosen: real estate crowd funding

Start with optimizing your site for horizontal search

For setting up my keyword strategy the basic rules that apply to horizontal search also apply to vertical search. I would begin by searching for relevant secondary keywords related to “real estate crowd funding” based on user intent analysis. Then I would create relevant content based around the selected keywords keeping in mind user intent and answering any questions a searcher may have (writing for human usage, not for search engines) along with proper call to actions to encourage next steps.

Next, I would use targeted metadata (meta titles/descriptions, video/image tags, etc.), execute proper schema markup, and set up an internal/external linking strategy to ensure we are still maintaining relevancy with the horizontal search engines.

Lastly, I would analyze the technical aspects of the pages to ensure everything is working correctly and site speed is optimized.

Research where your users are getting their data

To approach the vertical search landscape, I would begin by researching the target audience that maintains a presence in a number of relevant social media sites related to the “real estate crowd funding” keyword. . Facebook, Quora, Reddit, Wikipedia, YouTube, Slideshare/LinkedIn are all sites where quality content can be published to answer questions that searchers for this topic have asked. When performing my own searches for both “real estate crowdfunding” and “real estate crowd funding opportunities” I found that many users were searching reddit directly for answers. In addition, I learned that many searches were based around comparing various real estate crowdfunding tools. Contributing a synopsis or snippets of that post to sites like quora and reddit would help drive traffic back to your site for more information. Keeping your blog post content relevant to these topics and adjust this content by the search engine can help maintain readability and relate to audience behaviors.

I would also make sure to optimize your content for mobile experience on the vertical site. Utilizing Accelerated Mobile Pages to not only address Google’s mobile first algorithm update but also to ensure that your content looks flawless on all vertical search engines (I recommend this primarily for blog postings or internal content on service pages with the intent to be shared). Adding to this, optimizing Open Graph tags for social media pages is also very important so your message is uniform across all networks.

I did the optimization now how do I measure its success?

Lastly, to maintain the keywords, I would consistently perform keyword analysis to enhance and update the content whenever needed. Real estate crowdfunding is a quickly growing field that is subject to constant change with the financial markets. I want to make sure that I am providing updated results to the users reading the content provided to them. I would also research and develop as many integrations with vertical search sites and apps as would make sense with the “real estate crowdfunding” keyword. 

To summarize, while horizontal search focuses on branding for your website and cultivating content, vertical search focuses on the broader scope of branding for your market. In the pursuit of a deep understanding of your target audience and creating content that answers the questions they are asking across all platforms you are able to reach a wider audience than with just traditional marketing strategies alone. Your success is ultimately defined by your audience reach and your referrals which lead to conversions.