What About SEO in Personalized Google Search Results?

Have you heard the news yet?

Your Google Search Results Will Now Show Personalized Results.

How will this affect the rankings of your website?

How Personalized Search works

Google’s Web History allows you to view all the pages you have visited, including your Google Searches. Over time Google will deliver a more personalized search result as it can now draw from your search behaviour. Google takes note of the sites you have clicked on so your favourite sites will get a higher ranking on your next search.

For all of you who already had a google account, this has been happening since 2006. But now, Google has made this available for all users.  So no more need to be signed in.

Your search engine results Page (SERP) will only be affected for searches that relate to you web history of course of the last 180 days!!

Great! So the most relevant pages will achieve better rankings.

But how will this affect Search Engine Optimisation? Do you Still Need it?

Some concerns;

• Will a customer no longer be able to see your site if it already favours a competitor’s site?
• You may think you have excellent ranking whereas in fact, your search results page is skewed towards your own preferences…

SO, the rules of the games have just been changed a little

• You will no longer be able to see a consistent ranking
• For competitive keywords on-page optimisation and link building will become less important
• If you have a NEW website in a competitive industry, ranking will become exceptionally hard

Great Opportunities

• Most people will not be clicking on lousy websites anymore and they will slowly be pushed out. So good websites with great, relevant content will slowly move up the search results pages.
• In a personalized search result page, it is easier to stand out when a ‘new’ snippet appears. So new and fresh content from blogs, Twitter and Facebook will become more important.
• The relevancy of your snippets and meta descriptions in the Google Search Results Page will become even more important.
• You must now focus on the long-tail keywords as generic and single word keywords will be even more difficult to rank for.
• If you have regular repeat visitors you may actually find yourself get better rankings.

SEO- More than rankings

SEO is not just about achieving top 10 rankings.

SEO is also about the structure of your website and the user experience, its about getting ‘better’ traffic to your site, getting that traffic to ‘convert’.

Other elements like keyword research and selection are still very important and when ‘relevancy’ has just been given a new boost, the right keyword selection is seven more paramount.

….Of course, if you don’t like it you can always switch to BING or turn it off…

Click on the links below to see the screen shots of how to do that…

How to use your free Google Ad

Google Adwords may not be free, but there is another opportunity to advertise on Google and it’s actually free. Roughly 75% of people click on the organic search results. If you could advertise on the organic listing – would you do it?

You can…

When your customer finds you on the organic search result pages he will first read your ‘ad’. Your ‘ad’ is your meta description of that page.

Each page is different and needs its own meta description. Consider it your Call to Action, your opportunity to sell your page in a few words.

Meta Descriptions & SEO

Search engines may no longer use the Meta Description Tags to determine rankings, so stuffing this tag with keywords is not helpful at all. What you should do instead is capatilise on the opportunity the tag gives you to sell yourself to your customer.

Writing a good meta description

Now that you know the meta description is like your free ad on google, you must make sure it will be an ad that sells. Make sure you follow these guidelines when you write your free Google ad;

1. use up to 160 characters
2. describe what that page is really about (make it short en enticing)
3. make it a call to action – encourage people to click on it (think.. why would I click on this?)
4. make sure its relevant to the search query and use relevant keywords in the text

Good luck writing your free google ad.