Around the SEM World: Personalized Search
| Manoj Jasra - Monday, March 26, 2007 3 Comments |
"Around the SEM World" is a new monthly series I am starting in which I will ask professionals around the SEM Industry their thoughts on the hottest topics during the given month. March's topic is all about personalized search and its effect on search engine marketing strategies. This month I asked Bill Slawski of SEO By the Sea and Li Evans from Search Marketing Gurus about their thoughts on SEM in relation to personalized search.
Bill Slawski: I think that ultimately personalized search is going to require site owners to know and understand the interests of their targeted customers better, learn about where they like to visit on the web, what communities they may belong to, how the site owners can get involved in those communities, and what will convince customers to become evangelists for a site. Search marketers can be an integral part in creating that conversation.Search marketing should never just rely upon traffic from search engines, or rankings of a few strong keywords, regardless of personalization. Conversations with customers across the web, and business relationships with other sites that complement the offerings of a site will play a stronger role, and taking efforts to make a site a desired destination will payoff. Many more searches are informational in nature than transactional, and being perceived as a place to go to get honest and objective information can only help. Being seen as responsive to the interests of individuals, and willing to talk with them can be even more important.
Li Evans: Personalization on it’s own will have an “medium” affect on the industry in general – in all areas, PPC, SEO, Affiliate and even Social Media. Each will be affected in different ways, and some more than others. The major two being affected are PPC and SEO. As the search engines try to tailor what the searchers are really interested in clicking on, it’s going to become more evident that sites that have relevant content and ads are the sites they searchers are clicking on. Companies with websites, in my opinion, will need to focus on creative copy for ads, Title Tags and Meta Descriptions and actual relevant content on pages more than ever. It’s not only about what’s going to make those searchers not just click into their websites but if stay on the site and for how long.I’m thinking some of the search engines might even start to measure “pogo sticking” (if they aren’t already) into this personalization mixture. If someone clicks on a link and it’s not relevant to their search, they click back within a second, that’s another signal to the search engines to personalize the search for that person because they are essentially saying, “hey don’t show me stuff like this again.” If you take into account, everything that Google’s doing in the past few months (personalization, affiliate marketing and possibly limiting PPC ads) it will become extremely important that websites are relevant to their users. By that I mean, not just a catchy title tag or copy in a ppc ad that gets you to click into a page full of ad links, but that the site’s got relevant content. However, focusing in on personalization alone as a “problem” isn’t wise for any SEO/SEM – a more holistic view of the market needs to be done to understand how it affects websites, and that’s what we as search professionals do best.
Both Bill and Li make excellent points and I agree that search marketers will really have to develop a strong understanding of their clients' target market so they can fine tune the website's messaging. Internet marketing is already initiated and driven by consumers, therefore with Search Engines giving the power to the hands of searchers it further strengthens this paradigm. It will also be very important for organizations to know their competitive landscape so that they can differentiate themselves from their competitors.
Personalized Search Resources
- Personalized Search Brouhaha
- Google Relaunches Personal Search - This Time, It Really Is Personal
- The Pros & Cons Of Personalized Search
- Your Google Search Results Are Personalized
- Search Personalization and SEO
- Cutts: Google Personalized Search to Get Bigger - to Black Hat SEOs' Chagrin
- Official Google Blog: Search gets personal
- iMedia Connection: Personalized Search
- Yahoo Launches Personalized Search
Labels: Industry News, Interviews, SEM
Manoj,
Personalization will firstly free us from keyword ranking, that one special metric that almost every client wants.
On "What's Next":
As Bill and Li mention, it comes down to the fact that websites need to really focus on what the user wants in terms of content and usability more than ever.
I've mentioned on "SEO as Website Positioning Strategy?", that "New SEO" will need address three basic question
* How is your website’s content, structure and usability fit with the intent of your audience?
* How does your website “fit” in how people search (one-box searches on Google/Yahoo, Technorati, Oodle, vertical search engines)?
* How is your website positioned in Social Media Community? How do you want to participate?
The one question for me is this, how many Google users do have personalization turned on? And more importantly, what percentage of visitors do they represent?
- Daniel R
Daniel,
I absolutely agree with you on your 3 points. The social media point is important because websites will need to be able to leverage other means of marketing/traffic other than the search engines.
Thanks for the link to the article.
With the advent of personalised search and other related things, SEO becomes more of a challenge but no less relevant. In fact it is right now very relevant and even urgent!
No matter the level of personalisation Google offers, it can only vary result listings when people search for the same thing multiple times, and will generally only change results listings when a lower than top link has been clicked on more than once.
Although people are creatures of habit, millions of people every day search for things they have not yet searched for, giving raw results. And even personalised results will not be completely different to raw results - there will be some variation, but not a completely different set of listings!
I think for basic SEO each business needs to ensure they are near the top of listings for a raw (un-personalised result), and then not worry about who may be getting different personalised results - there will still be enough people getting all or some of the standard raw results to make it worthwhile. Also, two or three years down the track when google has for some people a couple years worth of cookie data, it will be harder to break into a person's personalised results - right now when the data banks are smaller it's easiers, to most important to get found now.
It does however mean that SEO is not the be all and end all - it means that a wider online and social marketing focus is also required in order to achieve business success.