Vertical search is search limited to one type of content or one sector. Google’s Images, Videos, News and Shopping tabs are vertical searches, and so are specialist sites such as Rightmove for property, Auto Trader for cars, Indeed for jobs and YouTube for video.
How vertical search works
A general web search tries to answer any question from any kind of page. A vertical narrows the field. It draws on its own index, or a filtered slice of the main one, and ranks results using signals suited to that content type. That is why getting into each vertical needs different inputs.
- Images depend on the image file being crawlable, plus descriptive file names, alt text and the words around the image on the page.
- Shopping relies mainly on a product feed submitted through Google Merchant Center, which also powers the free product listings shown to UK shoppers, supported by product structured data on the page.
- News favours timely, original reporting from publishers that meet Google’s news content policies.
- Videos need a page where the video is the main content, with a thumbnail Google can fetch.
- Maps and local come largely from Google Business Profile data.
Google also blends vertical results back into the main results page. An image pack, a Top Stories carousel, a row of product listings or a map with three businesses are all vertical results surfacing as SERP features. So vertical visibility affects the ordinary results page too, not only the tabs.
Specialist vertical engines work on the same principle with their own rules. A letting agent’s visibility on Rightmove depends on listing quality and the platform’s own sorting, not on anything happening on the agent’s website.
Why it matters
Plenty of buyers never touch the standard web results. Someone choosing a sofa may start in Google Images or the Shopping tab, someone fixing a boiler fault may go straight to Videos, and someone hiring in Manchester may begin on a job board. If your SEO effort only covers standard web listings, you are absent from the place where part of your market actually looks.
Verticals can also be less crowded. A product page that struggles to reach page one for a competitive term can still appear in Shopping results for that term if the feed is accurate and well described.
Common mistakes
- Optimising only for the ten blue links when the results for your main terms are dominated by images, products or video.
- Stock photography with generic file names Which gives Google Images nothing distinctive to rank.
- No Merchant Center feed for an online shop, which rules the products out of free Shopping listings entirely.
- Burying videos halfway down long text pages, so Google never treats the page as a video result.
- Neglecting marketplace and portal listings because they sit outside the website, even when they bring most of the enquiries.
How to act on it
Search your ten most important terms and note which verticals appear, both as tabs and as features on the main page. That tells you where demand is being served. In Google Search Console, the Performance report lets you switch the search type between Web, Image, Video and News, so you can see whether you already receive any vertical traffic.
Then pick the verticals that match how your customers buy, and give each one what it needs. For images that means image SEO, for products a clean feed, for video the steps covered under video SEO. Accurate structured data supports most of them, and it is a large part of the schema markup work I carry out for product, video and local pages.