Much like the Mayan Calendar (only with less hype and lead time), some companies and bloggers have been predicting the SEO doomsday with the advent of Google’s personalised search. Yes, Google rankings will now change according to what a user has searched for and clicked on before, in addition to changing along with their geographical location and other minor factors. The milder, geo-targeted version of personalised search has been in effect for some time now (with not quite so much accompanying doom and gloom!), and changed SEO tactics only mildly. Today we are looking at why the impact of the new Personalised Search is likely to be equally mild; we check out the precise impacts that the new algorithms are likely to have.
The impact of personalised search
To help quell any myths about the general impact of personalised search on the re-organisation of SERPs, here are some key facts to consider:
- Only queries that a user has made before (or queries related to the current one) and clicked on a result from will be affected
- Therefore, the vast majority of possible queries will be unaffected
- Positions 1-4 have been seen to be only minimally affected by the new personalised search
- Positions 5-10 have encountered a bit of jostling and re-arrangement, but the URLs in the top ten are mostly the same.
- Google has been personalising results for signed-in users for some time now – the big change with the new personalisation rollout is that changes will apply to signed-out users als
This means that the core activities of SEO really haven’t changed at all. We still need to make pages accessible, design sites and content that are useful and necessary, target the keywords that people would be using to search for a company, and continue with link building activities.
What has actually changed with personalised search?
From an SEO point of view, there will be several new characteristics of SERPs to adjust to. We should also see a few new trends emerging as personalised search becomes more entrenched. These will include:
- Ranking placements are no longer as ‘reliable’ as they once were. Tracking with personalisation-off will need to be done for comparison, but still may not provide an accurate picture of what the ranking actually is.
- The importance of site design, user experience, customer service etc will all have an effect not only on your traffic and conversion stats, but also on your SERPs.
- In light of this, companies that are already doing well in SERPs and in user experience design will become even more popular … the rich will get richer! This doesn’t mean that if you are already in the SERP elite, that you shouldn’t try – there is always room for re-organisation of results.
How should personalised search help our best practices evolve?
Much as the changes don’t indicate the need for an overhaul of the entire industry, the focus of SEO activities will need to change subtly. We’ll see some things become more important, such as:
- Getting visitors to your site by any possible means. The fact that a single visit will put you at (or close to) the top of the results for a particular term in the future means that top rankings are actually easier to achieve, in a sense!
- Improving user experience and branding will be critical. If visitors like your site and visit it over and over, there will be not only a direct traffic effect, but a direct SERP effect.
- Understanding your analytics and viewing them in conjunction with your SERP to get a better picture of the effect that your SEO activities are having.
Personalised search may not be either the dragon that the doomsday-ers believe it to be, or the knight in shining armour that Google portrays it as! It is something that we’ll certainly have to work with, though, and another reason to take your search engine optimisationto the next level.
