Personally, I too have experienced this, especially with MSN. It seems to have more of a problem determining what types of verticals are relevant to the searcher.

Bob Carilli was up next and presented a case study on how effective verticals have been for one of his clients.

Through some analysis they found that Froogle shopping results were showing up a lot for his clients’ competitive keyword terms, yet the Froogle listings were unoptimized.

They responded by creating a data feed for Froogle which was optimized to target these great phrases which had poor Froogle listings. As a result, his client’s site quickly moved to the top of the Froogle listings for those phrases. While it is unclear, I would assume this would have translated into similar top rankings in the Google area where Froogle is displayed.

This also shows that, as search marketers, we shouldn’t rely solely on SEO or PPC. There are dozens of verticals out there we could tap into if we had an open mind.

If you look at Google alone, there are opportunities in Google News (with properly optimized press releases), Froogle, as mentioned above, Google Local, Google Base, Google Video and more. Similarly, with Yahoo! and MSN there are verticals to research. Both engines also have a shopping portal, as well as news, video and local results.

In the end, verticals could become the “poor man’s” SEO tactic. If you can’t compete organically and can’t pay for top sponsored, perhaps you can optimize your product feed to appear ahead of all your competitors?

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