Personalization of search has been a growing topic of
interest for a while, but has stayed under the radar for
most people until now. With Google's widespread integration
of personalization into standard search results, search
marketers' attention has finally been firmly riveted on the
issue. Up until recently, Google provided two
personalization options:
- You could customize your Google Personalized
Homepage for quick access to information of your choice
(email messages, news headlines, etc.).
- You could get automatic personalization from your
search history.
Recently, Google started combining the above two options for
users who sign up for services through their Google
accounts. When you sign in, you get access to tailored
results utilizing information from your search history and
your Google home page. If you don't wish to see results
based on your past searches, you simply sign out of your
Google Account or turn the option to track your history off
in your Account settings.
To quote Danny Sullivan, "...anyone who signs-up for any
Google service using a Google Account (such as Gmail,
AdSense, Google Analytics among others) will automatically
be enrolled into three additional Google products: Search
History -- Personalized Search -- Personalized Homepage."
In the past, Google Accounts required you to manually enable
Search History. However, with the recent change,
personalized search has been enabled for all accounts, new
and old alike. All accounts also automatically get home
pages generated based on account information.
Widespread Personalization
We don't know for sure how rapidly search personalization
will take hold. However, a 2006 Choice Stream
Personalization Survey shows that consumer interest in the
issue is strong, with 79 percent of respondents indicating a
willingness to receive personalized content and more than
half of the 18-24 year olds asked expressing an interest.
The study also saw an increase in the number of people who
would be willing to trade privacy for increasingly tailored
results.
These findings can likely be generalized to search users
because the information required for search personalization
is less intrusive than the content participants were
questioned about in the survey.
Benefits and Drawbacks for Users and Site Owners
Personalization benefits users because it can help make
their searches more relevant based on past search behavior.
It also can help Web site owners who have excellent content
and well-written Titles, since the Web sites with the
"stickiest" content will be weighted more favorably.
However, in both cases there is also the possibility of
closing out potentially useful resources because they do not
fit a user's previous history.
In addition to good content, Web pages need good Title and
Description Meta tags. Because these are displayed on the
search results page, they represent the way human users will
judge the site and decide whether or not to click through.
You can also gain by getting yourself on the Google
personalized homepage of many search users. One way to do
this is to offer users a feed, a Google gadget, or Add To
Google buttons on your pages so users can subscribe to your
content. Another tip is to put Google Bookmark buttons on
your pages, such as those provided by AddThis. The more a
visitor relies on your site, the better ranking it will
receive when that user performs searches related to your
keywords. The winners in personalized search are those who
make a connection to their users because the results reward
loyalty.
Implications for SEO
Increased personalization in search results has obvious
implications for anyone performing search engine
optimization since search results will now differ from user
to user based on search history and user profile. Naturally,
all queries will show a change in ranking positions between
personalized and non-personalized results. Practitioners
have analyzed this effect and found that results for
personalized vs. non-personalized search can vary as much as
90 percent. Clearly, on page elements, particularly in the
content and Meta data, will become extremely important
again.
Rank Checking
The area most affected in the search optimization process is
rank checking. An article by Mike Moran in Revenue
January/February 2007 states, "Widespread
personalization will doom traditional rank checking".
Moran also asserts, "It's the biggest change in search
marketing since paid search."
Extensive personalization will affect the traditional rank
checking process because site rankings will differ based on
users' idiosyncratic search habits. SEO analysts will be
looking at average rankings rather than absolute rankings.
This will force a change in search engine optimization
techniques. Currently, SEO requires decision-making based
partly on researching targeted keyword phrases used by
leading competitors. With personalization, it becomes
difficult to identify the leading competitors because all
search results will differ.
Therefore, new methodologies for making search engine
optimization decisions will have to be devised. Traditional
SEO and on page optimization will still be very important
and SEOs will need to continue to improve pages, making them
superior to other pages for specific targeted keyword
phrases. This will require more thorough analyses of
competitor on-page and off-page factors.
The process of SEO competitor analysis will require data
collection, quantitative and qualitative analyses, as well
as multivariate analysis. Multivariate analyses can help
determine the relative importance and influence of multiple
factors compared to each other, yielding the competitive
landscape for your targeted key terms. The strengths and
weaknesses of this landscape will help practitioners make
the SEO decisions needed for targeting the right terms for
optimization.
In-depth competitor intelligence will give SEO practitioners
more accurate readings of how their client's Web pages
compare to their competitors' pages, and the result will be
more accurate information than we currently get with rank
checking.
The Challenge of Competitor Intelligence
In-depth competitor intelligence can reveal what's working
and what's not for a site's strongest competitors. It can
reveal which sites are competitively strong (or weak)
compared to the client's site, regardless of what the
respective ranking numbers would show with rank checking.
New age competitor intelligence will tell you what
optimization factors are most important for specific
competitive landscapes. Technicians will learn the true
competitive nature of a keyword phrase rather that just the
number of results returned for a specific query. They will
know exactly what SEO factors to work in order to strengthen
their client's position rather than guesstimate based on
general guidelines.
In-depth competitor intelligence will tell practitioners how
to prioritize the SEO factors to be optimized, revealing
semantic relationships between the client's content, the
competitors' content, and the semantic nuances of a keyword
phrase related to search personalization of user results.
Optimization in the era of personalization requires robust
competitive intelligence, and this will pay big dividends to
those who master analyzing the competitive landscape.
It is undoubtedly true that search will change dramatically
once personalization is widely adopted. However, SEO is an
art that is extremely flexible and will adapt with
widespread use of search history to affect rankings. SEO
practitioners have always been creative, and we will develop
new techniques to achieve search visibility for our clients
as personalized search becomes more prevalent.
