This time around, we examine a few of the challenges that SEOs will face in the future with the growing popularity of personalization of search. Personalization is the option that people can toggle on to improve their search results based on their personal interests. With personalization turned on, the search engine can gather information about the history of your searches and as the time you use it increases, it can actually become accustomed to your searching habits so as to present information that is more important or more interesting to you personally, than to someone else.
So where does the challenge come in with SEO you ask?
The challenge is that as the popularity of personalization grows so will there likely be a diminishing effect on your ranking reports. In simple, it means that 4 people in the same household could all be taking turns using the very same computer and doing searches for the very same keyword phrase, and yet each person would typically see completely different results because of their personal use of the Internet and a growing history of different interests.
What this means is that you no longer can tell exactly what your ranking reports mean because where you rank for one person will not be the same as where you rank for the next person or the next. Thus ranking reports could very well become meaningless in time.
It should be understood that with personalization turned on, the search engine is not using a different algorithm. Instead, the algorithm is the same, but there is a shuffling of results based on the particular individuals history of usage. The search engines attempt to serve up even more relevant content to that individual based on their personal interests.
This in turn means that it could become very difficult to determine where your ideal buying audience is finding you because you will no longer be able to simply do a search and see who is ranking number 1. Obviously if you are interested in your own products and you own industry, you site may come up in the top results when you search. But what is the rest of the world seeing? With personalization growing in popularity, there is no way you can use the traditional methods to know.
Personalization of Search may bring a new dimension of satisfaction by providing the user with much more personalized results. After all, everyone wants the best search results. However, it is bound to pose a few challenges for those who have never thought out what is really happening and the far reaching impact that it will have with posing certain challenges with respect to traditional search engine marketing. As I mentioned in part 1, there are solutions. But we feel that it's important to help SEO students grasp the implications of how much things could possibly be affected.
So what are others saying about how big this change will be?
Michael Marshall is a respected SEO associate educator and advanced mathematician who has taught with Robin Nobles and I over the last several years. Michael is a technical expert who often teaches at our Ultra Advanced Symposiums.
Here is a recent quote from an article that Michael published he states that:
"Without a reliable means of rank checking, traditional SEO loses its foundations for optimization decisions. They can't tell who the leaders are. They've lost sight of the bellwethers. A bellwether is any entity in a given arena that serves to create or influence trends or to presage future happenings. Without a bellwether, for example, sheep might be left to wander aimlessly. Without a reliable means of rank checking, traditional SEO also loses its metrics for determining its success or failure regarding changes made for the sake of optimization. Traditional SEO is a process the methodology of which is predominantly trial and error."
To read Michael's full article, please see "Personalization of Search and its implications for SEO." http://www.evancarmichael.com/SEO/1279/Personalization-of-Search-and-its-implications-for-SEO.html
In his article, Michael Marshall does far more justice to the topic than I can, on a technical level but also see full quotes he has from an IBM Distinguished Engineer Mike Moran and how large he estimates Personalization will affect the future.
The solution to the challenges of the effect of personalization is being able to grasp the big picture. Gone are the days of counting characters in a Title tag or Description tag. Trying to measure SEO influences separately one at a time will be obsolete.
Advanced competitive intelligence is not just a new "buzz" word.
The type of solutions to these challenges will actually have a variety of excellent benefits other than just gaining genuine visibility.
Try and imagine being able to do search marketing and optimization in only the minimum of moves, making only the minimum of changes for your exact search landscape and making maximum impact.
Will these techniques really be possible in the future you ask?
No, actually they are available right now so you can begin to stabilize your results and prepare for the changes. No one can say for sure the rate at which personalization will make it's impact. The sad thing for some who are unawares is that with only slow and subtle changes over a given period, they may never even realize what is happening other than their traffic is dead and sales have stopped. So we start by making our students and readers aware.
Source: Entireweb
