SEO: More on Personalized Search

Dec 22, 2009

Just read an article by Danny Sullivan, musing on the release of Google’s personalized search. He feels the same way as I do. Google put the announcement in a teeny little blog post and didn’t really make any huge announcement. The Google ghods just put it into operation, hoping we wouldn’t notice. It’s kind of like that health care bill they’re forcing through after hours, eh? Messing with people’s income and nobody is supposed to be worried. hmm…

A lot of SEOs are running around like chickens saying that SEO is dead. I don’t believe that. I think it’s radically changed, but not at all in the last throes of life. So, what can we do to make personalized search good for our businesses?

Another view

Rand Fishkin (randfish), CEO and co-founder of SEOMoz.org wrote a great post about personalized search, its impact, and what we can do to continue boosting rankings.

In terms of impact, he says that rank checking will be less accurate. That’s a no-brainer. You can’t possibly figure out where your site will show up on an individual’s search results page.

It used to be that everyone who searched for “blue jeans” would come back with the same results. Now, that’s not the case. Based on your previous searches from the past 180 days, Google will decide what sites you’d prefer seeing in that regard and serve them up to you. Some folks might see “Levi’s blue jeans” first, while others might see “Lee’s blue jeans.”

That’s a very simple example, but that’s what will happen. If you were over at Amazon looking at Levi’s, you’ll get Levi’s first, for example. At least that’s what it means to me.

Fishkin also says that heavy-duty sites in the top spots will continue to be in those spots and their history of being previously will play heavily in the new scheme of things. The long-tail phrases will really be important, too. If someone types in “black leather executive desk chair,” and Office Depot came up in the past, typing in “black desk chair” will still keep them at the top of the page, regardless of how many of the words in the phrase are used, right? It’s all about history.

But even if sites suck at SEO, just because people like them and have visited them over and over, they’ll come out the winners on their personal search results. No title? No description? … If people just like you or your site, no problem!

And what about paid search? Will that come to bear in the new algorithms used for personalized results? Could be.

What’s the Plan?

So, what are we to do? Do we take what we’ve learned and chuck it all?

No.

Get more traffic. The more visitors you get, the more likely it is that you’ll show up in their results pages. It’s all about history, remember?

Make sure that customers love you and want to keep coming back. By creating a bond with your audience, you’re creating a search result. My friend Brian Edmondson brought up a good point the other day in his blog post. If you get to the newbies FIRST, you’ll show up in their results. That might be a cool way to think of it. Newbies are coming online every day, trying to make money. If you’re in their faces first thing, off the bat, you’ll probably be on their personal SERPs.

We’ll also need to be watching the stats more closely. How did people arrive at your pages? What keywords did they type into the search box? Have they been to your site before? How long did they stay once they arrived? All these things are important, but they’ll only become more and more important over time. We should be watching this stuff, anyway. We’ll just need to watch it better.

And another thing I’m going to throw in is: How long did it take your page to load? This is a key factor in Google’s Caffeine update. Make sure your site loads as quickly as possible. Get rid of anything that’s slowing it down.

The basics still matter. Make keyword research your #1 directive. Don’t skimp on this. Use your time wisely by making keyword research every bit as important as that buck you’re chasing. Without diligent research, you may never find that buck. So, it’s definitely a case of the egg (keywords) coming before the chicken.

And build content. Unique content. No scamming the system with crap that you’ve spun. It just doesn’t work. Make all of our content 100% unique and you’ll find that you get much better results. The links you get coming back from that great stuff that builds a relationship with your audience will be extremely valuable, and there will be no doubt that the content is yours.

It will be interesting to see how search transforms in the future, but that’s really how SEO is, right? Always changing. Always a challenge. And that’s what makes it fun.

Technorati Tags: seo, personalized search, search results, danny sullivan, brian edomondson, randfish

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