Personalization
Filed under: Education and Training, SEO, Social Marketing on Monday, August 20th, 2007 by Simon HeseltineContinuing my live session postings from SES SJ…
This session is moderated by Chris Sherman, and is on the topic of Personalized Search.
First up is Gord Hotchkiss talking about what will drive personalization and how it will affect seo. The eye tracking study showed that when personalized search results were added into the 3rd 4th & 5th results, the eyes went down to those results. When the results weren’t personalized, they didn’t…
Does personalization work too well? If the natural results are so good, will anyone want to click on the paid ads? Images in the organic results pull the eye there first. Eye scanning is therefore spread more around the page, rather than being concentrated on the top of the page.
In the pre-personalization world, we looked at keywords, on page factors, and links. Now with personalization it’s a much more user centered idea. Optimization will happen around themes rather than keywords. Long tail optimization. Optimization across content buckets. Understanding user behavior will be vital. User centric development will take hold. Emerging “Buzz sites” will be an SEO tactic.
You need to move up the funnel. From purchase to negotiation to research to awareness. More mashups, widgets, etc.
The circle of importance are sites that will emerge for each ‘theme’.
User Intelligence is going to be vitally important. Need to understand user intent.
The next presenter was Richard Zwicky. He’s going to be addressing regionalization of results as they pertain to personalization
Page clicks 1 – Organic – 83.62%, PPC – 96.26%. So if you’re not on page 1, you’re not going to get much traffic.
He performed searches in Vancouver, Seattle, and San Jose. The organic results were different in each location for the same search.
Language regionalization is also a factor. Wherever you are in the country there may be a different term for the same item. i.e. Soda v Pop.
How to find out what works. Geotarget your PPC campaigns, let the paid keywords do your research. For in-house SEO’s, he advises pulling in consultants as search becomes more diverse and more specialized.
SEO campaigns now have to become more sophisticated, better research tools and reports are needed.
The next presenter was Dave Davies. He is presenting on 4 Google patents related to personalization.
User Behavior. Engines watch user behavior to assess the value of web pages. Click through, time to return to engine (clicking the back button / leaving your site and going to the search engine), and the type of query are the 3 behaviors watched by the engines.
Personal pagerank: Is the idea that Google will assign a value to an individual searcher. This will be used to grade your activities on websites. More trusted searchers wil affect the results to a greater degree than those who are not trusted.
Group data: Grouping together users based on common factors i/e/ membership in common communities (Facebook, etc). Common bookmarks, and common search behavior.
Influencing engines: Rankings vary form region to region, and from person to person. Some factors have little to do with typical SEO. Personlization only affects those signed into a service (i.e. gmail, blogger, etc). People need to localize, getting your regional phrase associated with a location through link relationships. Link out by associating yourself with authorities an send your visitors out to them, rather than back to the engines. Attract high personal pagerank visitors. Design for stickiness an page views, monitor stats and tweak for phrases with low visitor experience levels.
Next up was Jonathan Mendez. He made sure to ensure that people realized that we’ve had personalized search for a long while… it’s called PPC.
Nothing performs better than targeting to the intentions of users.
He then examined the parameters in a Google URL – host language, safe search, browser, results language, query, etc. Each of these can be used for personalization, and for examining personalization trends.
He then discussed various types of segmentation
- Behavioral – types of search
- Source – Organic, Paid, etc
- Temporal – time scale
- Environmental – geo, etc
He showed a case study which showed that serving a personalized page based on the language parameter from Google led to a 47% increase in conversions.
Differences in the type of search are interesting. Based on a case study – when a particular phrase was searched using exact search the conversion rate was 2.63%. Using broad match, the conversion rate was 4.36%. Using Phrase match, the conversion rate was a staggering 15.16%.
Geotargeting is the big hitter of personalization and relevance. Keywords are the window to the intent of the user.
Sepandar of Google and Tim of Yahoo then briefly spoke on the panel.
Sepandar talked about how personalization work best with 1 or 2 word queries. iGoogle was created to answer the question “What should I be searching for?”. He then gave an example of tarot.com, that created a horoscope gadget for iGoogle. They get 37 million page views of that widget every week…
Tim recommended that you should become the known expert, and you should be unique offering something fresh. Having fresh content, which can spread virally is a great way to get your content noticed by the engines. Make use of Social Media sites, they can really make a difference.
