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The Impact of Personalization on SEO
By Claudia Bruemmer (c) 2007

Personalization of search has been a growing topic of interest
for a while, but has stayed under the radar for most people
until now. With Google's widespread integration of
personalization into standard search results, search marketers'
attention has finally been firmly riveted on the issue. Up until
recently, Google provided two personalization options:

  • You could customize your Google Personalized Homepage for
    quick access to information of your choice (email messages,
    news headlines, etc.).

  • You could get automatic personalization from your search
    history.

Recently, Google started combining the above two options for
users who sign up for services through their Google accounts.
When you sign in, you get access to tailored results utilizing
information from your search history and your Google home page.
If you don't wish to see results based on your past searches,
you simply sign out of your Google Account or turn the option to
track your history off in your Account settings.

To quote Danny Sullivan, "...anyone who signs-up for any Google
service using a Google Account (such as Gmail, AdSense, Google
Analytics among others) will automatically be enrolled into
three additional Google products: Search History -- Personalized
Search -- Personalized Homepage." In the past, Google Accounts
required you to manually enable Search History. However, with
the recent change, personalized search has been enabled for all
accounts, new and old alike. All accounts also automatically get
home pages generated based on account information.

Widespread Personalization

We don't know for sure how rapidly search personalization will
take hold. However, a 2006 Choice Stream Personalization Survey
shows that consumer interest in the issue is strong, with 79
percent of respondents indicating a willingness to receive
personalized content and more than half of the 18-24 year olds
asked expressing an interest. The study also saw an increase in
the number of people who would be willing to trade privacy for
increasingly tailored results.

These findings can likely be generalized to search users because
the information required for search personalization is less
intrusive than the content participants were questioned about in
the survey.

Benefits and Drawbacks for Users and Site Owners

Personalization benefits users because it can help make their
searches more relevant based on past search behavior. It also
can help Web site owners who have excellent content and
well-written Titles, since the Web sites with the "stickiest"
content will be weighted more favorably. However, in both cases
there is also the possibility of closing out potentially useful
resources because they do not fit a user's previous history.

In addition to good content, Web pages need good Title and
Description Meta tags. Because these are displayed on the search
results page, they represent the way human users will judge the
site and decide whether or not to click through.

You can also gain by getting yourself on the Google personalized
homepage of many search users. One way to do this is to offer
users a feed, a Google gadget, or Add To Google buttons on your
pages so users can subscribe to your content. Another tip is to
put Google Bookmark buttons on your pages, such as those
provided by AddThis. The more a visitor relies on your site, the
better ranking it will receive when that user performs searches
related to your keywords. The winners in personalized search are
those who make a connection to their users because the results
reward loyalty.

Implications for SEO

Increased personalization in search results has obvious
implications for anyone performing search engine optimization
since search results will now differ from user to user based on
search history and user profile. Naturally, all queries will
show a change in ranking positions between personalized and
non-personalized results. Practitioners have analyzed this
effect and found that results for personalized vs.
non-personalized search can vary as much as 90 percent. Clearly,
on page elements, particularly in the content and Meta data,
will become extremely important again.

Rank Checking

The area most affected in the search optimization process is
rank checking. An article by Mike Moran in Revenue
January/February 2007 states, "Widespread personalization will
doom traditional rank checking". Moran also asserts, "It's the
biggest change in search marketing since paid search."

Extensive personalization will affect the traditional rank
checking process because site rankings will differ based on
users' idiosyncratic search habits. SEO analysts will be looking
at average rankings rather than absolute rankings. This will
force a change in search engine optimization techniques.
Currently, SEO requires decision-making based partly on
researching targeted keyword phrases used by leading
competitors. With personalization, it becomes difficult to
identify the leading competitors because all search results will
differ.

Therefore, new methodologies for making search engine
optimization decisions will have to be devised. Traditional SEO
and on page optimization will still be very important and SEOs
will need to continue to improve pages, making them superior to
other pages for specific targeted keyword phrases. This will
require more thorough analyses of competitor on-page and
off-page factors.

The process of SEO competitor analysis will require data
collection, quantitative and qualitative analyses, as well as
multivariate analysis. Multivariate analyses can help determine
the relative importance and influence of multiple factors
compared to each other, yielding the competitive landscape for
your targeted key terms. The strengths and weaknesses of this
landscape will help practitioners make the SEO decisions needed
for targeting the right terms for optimization.

In-depth competitor intelligence will give SEO practitioners
more accurate readings of how their client's Web pages compare
to their competitors' pages, and the result will be more
accurate information than we currently get with rank checking.

The Challenge of Competitor Intelligence

In-depth competitor intelligence can reveal what's working and
what's not for a site's strongest competitors. It can reveal
which sites are competitively strong (or weak) compared to the
client's site, regardless of what the respective ranking numbers
would show with rank checking.

New age competitor intelligence will tell you what optimization
factors are most important for specific competitive landscapes.
Technicians will learn the true competitive nature of a keyword
phrase rather that just the number of results returned for a
specific query. They will know exactly what SEO factors to work
in order to strengthen their client's position rather than
guesstimate based on general guidelines.

In-depth competitor intelligence will tell practitioners how to
prioritize the SEO factors to be optimized, revealing semantic
relationships between the client's content, the competitors'
content, and the semantic nuances of a keyword phrase related to
search personalization of user results. Optimization in the era
of personalization requires robust competitive intelligence, and
this will pay big dividends to those who master analyzing the
competitive landscape.

It is undoubtedly true that search will change dramatically once
personalization is widely adopted. However, SEO is an art that
is extremely flexible and will adapt with widespread use of
search history to affect rankings. SEO practitioners have always
been creative, and we will develop new techniques to achieve
search visibility for our clients as personalized search becomes
more prevalent.
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Claudia A. Bruemmer is a former Managing Editor of ClickZ
(1998-2001), where she achieved the editorial success resulting
in its first sale to Internet.com. Currently a freelance
Internet writer, her clients include Bruce Clay, Inc.
(http://www.bruceclay.com/), Search Engine Watch
(http://searchenginewatch.com/), TopTenWholesale
(http://www.toptenwholesale.com/) and more. She can be reached
at cbruemmer@bruceclay.com and has a website under construction
at claudiabruemmer.com.
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