TrueInsight Newsletter

Recent personalization advancements could affect your search marketing strategy

On February 2, Google announced significant changes to its suite of personalization services for Google account subscribers. The biggest change? Personalization is now the default setting for new Google accounts. That means all three of Google’s personalization services—personalized search history, personalized search results, and a personalized homepage—are now integrated into a single, sign-in experience that users must elect to turn off. What does this mean for natural search marketers, and what does this mean for search overall?

It helps to understand how personalized search works. By tracking and logging your past search activity—both your queries and your resulting clicks—the search engines create a personalized search history for each user. The search engines then use that search history, and, to a lesser degree, your bookmarks and personalized homepage, to tailor your search results to your specific preferences.

Let’s say we search on the term “ravens.” As a Baltimore resident (known through my IP address) and as someone who may have performed similar searches before (my personalized search history comes into play), I will most likely see several search results that refer to the great NFL team on the first page. A zoologist, however, will probably get results that focus on the bird itself. What about a zoologist in Baltimore? She might see a sprinkling of both football-related and avian websites, thanks to the search algorithms that support both localization and search behavior. If you have no search history on “ravens,” Google considers you a novice on the query and will return its standard, non-personalized results.

While the message of personalization is not new, the implications of Google’s aggressive stance on personalized search are great.

In an interview with Search Engine Land columnist Gord Hotchkiss, Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of Search and User Experience, argued that these changes “push the envelope of search more such that [the user will] expect personalized results by default. And we think that search engines in the future will be better for a lot of different reasons, but one of the reasons will be that we understand the user better.”

Hotchkiss draws his own conclusions from the interview: “The one thing that became clear in the interview is that personalization marks the primary strategic platform for Google’s innovation in the future. For many of us, the recent Google announcement served as a warning that personalization’s day is rapidly approaching and the day of the universal search results page will soon be over for many queries.”

This being the case, search marketers and website owners alike are naturally asking what effect this will have on visibility within search engine rankings—and therefore, how to adjust to the algorithmic evolution towards personalization. As you may guess, Google’s announcement triggered a frenzy of blog activity on popular industry websites like Search Engine Watch and Graywolf’s SEOblog.

The resounding message is what we’ve known from the start: CONTENT is King. If you build a good, crawl-able website, based on highly relevant content that has the needs and desires of the end-user in mind, they will come.

What personalization does do is that it weeds out the black hat methods of SEO—that is, trying to reverse engineer search engine algorithms and spam with keywords. In another interview with Gord Hotchkiss, Matt Cutts, Google’s head of quality control, observed, “There’s a fork in the road, and people can think hard about whether they’re optimizing for users or whether they’re optimizing primarily for search engines.”

Cutts went on to say that the future of SEO is going to rely on social media optimization: sites that attract buzz, word of mouth, and, ultimately, links.

But even with social media optimization, traditional SEO best practices will continue to serve as a solid foundation: keyword-rich content, internal linking strategies, site usability and crawl-ability, directory and search engine submissions, and yes, even META data. In fact, in an article by Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Land, Sullivan says that “titles and descriptions are crucial. You need the clickthrough more than ever. Clickthroughs get your site seen as possibly important to a particular person’s profile.”

Of course, all of this takes time—time that most site owners do not have. Therefore, the need for professional Search Engine Optimization is perhaps even greater than ever before, as personalization takes the search experience to the next step. But in the end, we all benefit: the searcher, the search marketer, and the site owner. Because what’s true today will still be true tomorrow: if you have good content and a well-structured site, you’ll get rewarded with visits.