Dave Naffziger's Blog

I expected that Google’s new Universal Search results would have an impact on Judy’s Book’s traffic. We get a decent amount of traffic from regular search, but we also get a healthy amount of traffic because our reviews are embedded in Google Local. Since most of our Google traffic is local-related and since local is one of Google’s verticals, I expected the Universal Search switch to have some impact.

The short answer is that it didn’t have a big impact on overall traffic, but it is clear that Universal Search has impacted how users interact with Google’s services. The total number of visitors remained about the same, but the source of the traffic did change slightly.

Our share of visits from Google is shown in the graph below.

Our traffic from maps.google.com doubled (from 2% to 4%), which may indicate that Universal Search is sending more traffic to Google’s maps property.

The google.com/maps referrals were mostly onebox referrals, which theoretically have gone away. You can still get there by doing an address search and clicking on the Google map or the address. Still, I don’t understand why the traffic swap would have been so smooth between the onebox results (which declined) and organic results (which grew).