Posted by: Gloria Dutton, Marketing Coordinator
Personalized search is not completely new. It has been introduced slowly over the last couple of years, but it is now in full force. It is important to pay attention to this change and optimize search engine marketing (SEM) programs accordingly, since a shift towards personalization alters the broader search landscape.
Many factors play a part in determining how search results are shown to any given user, such as past searches, Gmail activity, IP address and more. In addition, once search results are displayed, Google SearchWiki users are further able personalize their listings by removing what they find irrelevant, adding URLs, posting comments, and designating which listings are their favorites. So what does this mean for the future of search? It’s going through big changes, but if we keep just a few key points in mind while optimizing our websites, we should be able to keep up with the transition.
Focus on Traffic:
Bruce Clay recently stated that ranking is dead. Since search results are now manipulated to fit the needs of each individual searcher, using your sites ranking as a metric of success will not measure up. Your site may appear in position one for one searcher and a much lower position for another. A truer measure of success, then, comes from analyzing traffic metrics. You need to look at what is driving traffic to your site and whether or not this traffic is qualified. Analyze things such as bounce rates, time on site, user actions, etc. Tools that provide you with deeper statistics, such as Google Analytics, are what you should be looking at to judge how effective your online efforts are.
Engage the User:
Since universal search was released, Google’s ranking algorithm moved from its standard of 128 variables to over 200 variables. Industry experts believe that these new variables are all related to engagement aspects of the site, such as video, images and maps. Everything is about engaging and capturing your audiences’ attention, and Google is starting to weigh these factors more heavily in site quality.
Remember Your Audience:
Currently quality score is not affected by user actions on the Google SearchWiki. While users can remove irrelevant adds and pick favorites, this only changes their personal search pages. In the future, however, this is expected to change. While advertisers cannot really influence how individual people rank their site, they can make sure that they are appearing on the correct result pages. Just as in the past, the key is to make sure your site and keywords are parallel to what your target audience is searching for. This will help eliminate the chance for people to check your site as an irrelevant result. It is also important to not search for keywords and click to your own site as a favorite to increase rankings. While it is not clear if this will end up penalizing you or not, it is a Spam tactic, and it is better to play it safe. Google almost always catches onto these shady techniques in the end.
