Posted by Al Scillitani on November 21, 2008 – 8:35 am
All the talk right now seems to be about Google’s Personalization and how it will affect the rankings and your sales. It is all doom and gloom. After reading some of the articles and hearing people speak, you feel like shutting down your sites and giving up. They discuss how your ranking will now drop and there is nothing you can do about it. Well I am here to tell you, it is not doom and gloom and probably 90% of you will not even notice a drop in sales or leads.
That is right, optimistic Al says, “if you have been adhering to SEO best practices, most will not notice any drop is sales or leads due to personalization.” As many of my blog readers know, I won’t leave it at that, I am going to outline some things you should do and why your site will probably not be affected.
Here goes:
First let’s try to figure out why Google started personalization. It makes complete sense to me that they would want to do it. If someone searches a broad term, like “soccer,” are they looking for news about soccer, do they want to purchase soccer balls, looking to buy soccer apparel, are they looking for a soccer league to join, etc.. Google will see that you have been searching and viewing daily news about soccer and may start bumping some of those more relevant sites that were in positions 7 and 8 to higher positions. Makes sense and is good for the searcher and for Google (always keep the word “relevant” in mind).
Now, why is it important for you to understand that? People are searching smarter. It is very unlikely a person that types in “soccer” is ready to immediately buy soccer equipment. If someone wants to buy soccer shoes, or better yet have a brand they like, and search for “Adidas soccer shoes” or cleats, I will bet the personalization will not negatively affect the rankings of this search. As people learn more and more about personalization and searching, they will search for more specific things when they want to buy. If someone searched “adidas adiPURE TRX FG cleats” Google will not be serving tons of press releases and news articles to people even if they searched some soccer related news articles a couple of times before. I also feel as searchers get more educated they will be using “buy,” “discount,” “sale,” and other “ready to purchase” terms in their searches which will bring the highly relevant stores selling these products to the top.
In a nutshell, personalization may affect the less relevant one keyword searched broader terms more than specific long tail terms. As many in ecommerce know, the long tail is the most relevant, highest converting traffic.
I try not to ever talk in absolutes. I have helped optimize 100’s of accounts from mom and pops to Lowes Home Improvement and Motorola and I know first hand all sites are not created equal. I can not say personalization will never hugely affect a specific site, but I will say it is not all doom and gloom. Most will not even notice any changes to revenue solely due to personalization, some may see a slight drop, some may see a slight increase and there actually are things you can do to help your site. Here are a few things you can do to help reduce, or possibly eliminate, the affects of personalization. Basically, these 3 simple things will help Google a) understand what is on your site, b) who your potential customers are, and c) where information is located on your site. All of these suggestions have been written about before, nothing earth shattering, but now that you have a better understanding of personalization, you can see why these recommendations are even more important and how they will help.
1. Descriptive Unique Title and Description Tags
The long tail is going to be even more important with personalization. Every single one of your products/pages MUST have a unique title and description tag. The tags must contain the specific product/service you are offering and possibly other information as needed.
2. Write for the User, Write for the User, Write for the User!!
Did I mention write for the user? Describe the product or service in the body of the page as if someone walked up to you and asked about it. Use the specific product/service name, similar words (example- shoes, footwear), and be thorough.
3. Use a Google Site Map
Lastly, if your traffic and sales have been dramatically affected by personalization for a particular search term, and after checking with many people on multiple computers it appears your competitors has not been affected, then it may be your site. Why do I say that? If many people search a term like “soccer cleats” and you feel your competitors ranking stayed the same, but only you dropped, you have to ask yourself “why does Google think my competitors site is more relevant for that term?” Review the competing sites title, description, and content and compare it to yours. Try to get backlinks with that keyword adtext. Again, this falls back to best practices.
If Google does make a mistake and ends up dropping the rank of your site and of your competitors for a converting term, you have another tool you should be using to compensate for these lost sales (notice I didn’t write lost traffic, I wrote lost sales), Paid Search! Take advantage of this opportunity and run some highly relevant, compelling, ads with great calls to action. This may be only a temporary glitch. Your paid search manager will be your hero!
Conclusion: Relax, take a deep breath and follow SEO best practices. Personalization is your friend and is simply a feature Google created to serve relevant (there is that word again) sites to their users requests. You obviously made it through the “Universal Search” doom and gloom hysteria, you can make it through this as well.
I would love to hear you feedback on what I wrote and from people that have experienced any changes to their site due to personalization (good or bad).
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