Google Universal Search Ranking: How It Works?

The universal search was first introduced in the year 2007. Since then, with more data, Search Engines such as Google, and Bing have become more rich and advanced. With the inception of universal search, people from anywhere in the world, from any region or language can have global access to information that’s more than just web results. Google started considering local results, images, videos, jobs, maps, and more to present the most relevant information to its users.

A reliable SEO company in India is quick to notice any changes or algorithmic shifts and they adapt well. However, many individuals are still confused about how universal search works, or maybe what is it, after all.

This blog will serve as a guide to explain to you what is universal search, what are its ranking factors, and how it truly works. Read till the end to gain valuable information about this topic.

What Is Universal Search And What Are Its Ranking Factors?

Universal Search is what makes Google result pages so dynamic. Earlier, before this update, only web results were presented. However, with the arrival of this update, videos, local results, and images also started appearing in search results to provide the most relevant results to the users.

Ever since this update rolled out, multiple factors are getting added on eventually. With more data, multiple unique search results are appearing and will appear in the future. It’s the universal search that adds dynamics to the search results and presents the best results to the users in any form appropriate for the user.

As far as the ranking factors are concerned there are a ton of them. Formerly, it was believed that there were 200 ranking factors. However, with advanced technology, Google is way past that number and that’s true for any other search engine as well.

However, Google does provide a group of factors that influence Universal Search. They are:

• Quality
• Topicality
• Page Speed
• Freshness
• Structured Data
• Entities
• RankBrain

Google assigns every page a rank score based on these 7 real parameters.

How Universal Search Truly Works?

As stated above, Google assigns a page score to every web content page. A total score gets assigned to every page based on the 7 group factors. However, in the future with the way things are progressing, Google can introduce new factors.

You should be aware that one poor factor is enough to destroy your page score. Therefore, to appear in Universal searches and to rank, one must have all these 7 factors at the top.

All your factors need to be phenomenally strong. Google Universal Search Ranking prefers businesses with all 7 web factors. These are the businesses that will reflect or show on SERP at the top.

How The Top Results Are Refined?

Once the top 10 results are selected, they are refined through a second algorithm. It’s done in case any of the results slipped through the parameters.

However, the factors in this vary and appear to be aimed at specific cases. So, a final score can change and cause a shift in rankings.

It is only after this that the results diversify. News, video, images, maps, or anything relevant and satisfying the Google algorithm criteria appear in the results. So, the diversification intensifies and it is only after these strict checks that Google ranks businesses for their content and makes them appear for a search query.

Certainly, each content has its unique factors. Think about it, an alt tag is specifically a factor for an image. However, for other content, it might be redundant.

Even various content formats have varying measuring factors. Freshness is going to be a crucial factor in News. However, Featured Snippets would heavily rely on RankBrain.

With the final factors set in, Google becomes all set to display the final results. The approach is to provide the user with the best answer to their query.

As more factors are added in and the businesses abide by those laws, they get better placed or ranked. Businesses that qualify for all factors are ranked well, whereas those that fail, perish. Ranking factors can again vary depending on the type of content. However, Google or any search engine’s main criteria is to present the relevant result to the user.

Conclusion

The number of universal features is increasing with advanced technology that’s also making the Google algorithm complicated yet accurate to understand user intent. Therefore, content is way beyond just writing. Producing quality infographics, images, videos, news alerts, and more can also bring SEO benefits to a business. Integrating other platforms such as Social Media Channels, YouTube, etc. is the key. Creating and distributing content for them is the way businesses should look at SEO in the future.