Why Personalisation Will Have an Effect on SEO
If users or clients see different SERP's based on their search patterns, how can we measure and maintain consistent ranking results? As far as client reporting is concerned the manual or automatic software generated ranking reports will have little meaning, although this is probably a blessing in disguise for most SEO companies.
How will we be able to reach a target market if the search results are already 'geared' to show their competitor's brand? From our research and that of others the chances of a brand new website, targeting a competitive search query, will be very minimal of appearing in SERPs customised by personalisation, even with the best efforts of an SEO company.
If your client's website does not rank well now for their target search queries, they will slip even further and further as the users search is refined by their search activity and the using of websites already placed in those higher positions.
For those who have clients that do not 'opt-out' of personalisation and then visit their own websites may have a false impression that their website is ranking well and therefore not continue engage the services of an SEO company.
To add to this if they then visit their competitor's websites this may unwittingly gain them(their competitors) a higher ranking although the result of this is more likely just to create a false impression that their websites are not ranking well in the and one again blame their SEO company.
Companies / brands with greater search traffic will bet better placed to gain new business because searchers will see more impressions of snippets to their sites.
This does however create branding opportunities via snippets.
This in turn will lead to the possibility of ranking for the more generic search terms more profoundly difficult (as larger brands will tend to dominate based on market search share).
This will mean that SEO strategies using long tail search terms will become more the norm.
The top search engine competitors will fall down the ratings if their snippets and offerings are not competitive enough, allowing lower ranked sites to take over.
Complacency will see major changes in some of the most competitive niches.
On-site optimisation and link building can no longer have as much influence on their websites rank for competitive search queries.
Titles, META descriptions and text snippet optimisation will become SEO priorities once again with more emphasis than ever on locating less competitive search terms with high traffic.
It should also see you removing exceedingly 'spammy' web pages as their lack of popularity will increase the desire for these pages not to be chosen during a search.
These should be replaced by highly relevant and informative pages that are refreshed as often as possible to increase the users desire to re-visit the website and thus increase its search results potential.
Real-time content generated by Twitter, Facebook etc.
are also going to need fresh relative content and in greater volume.
With the advent of live search how much space will be left on page 1 for an abundance of organic results anyway.
Static websites are going to fall to oblivion.
Audience demographic targeting and snippet relevancy will become more important when optimising web page content.
This will also impact PPC ads as they will have to work harder and be more effective to compete with the increased brand-biased SERPs.
Google will of course be the biggest beneficiaries from its changes as PPC will become more and more popular as people find organic SEO too unpredictable and abandon it.
If in fact clicking on listings will be affecting search results and this begins to impact what users see, surely this will leave the door wide open for 'black hat' to reign supreme as software is developed to falsely click on those website wishing to be promoted.
Maybe the only alternative will be to start looking at using other search engines such as Bing as a viable source of traffic.
Have we convinced you that that SEO is now dead? Well let us just back up a little and try and get some true perspective to the situation.
Why Personalisation WILL NOT affect SEO: Personalisation has been in place for some time already - since 2005 in fact.
The only difference now is that rather than choosing to have it turned on it is automatically on and you choose to turn it off.
The first big change will be to see how the new 'caffeine' will affect our clients search results and the basis upon which we decide to SEO websites for this.
There is little chance of us being able to make the search engine user choose our clients website or be able to predict what will appeal regularly but it needs to be the best it can be.
We know as always we will be looking to second guess Google and ascertain some of the parameters that will be affected by caffeine and this area needs to be looked at first.
Most non-personalised search engine results are not identical these days anyway.
We have even noted differences for the same search query on same PC in the same location a few minutes apart.
Different data centres and Everflux between them mean constantly shifting search engine results.
The one most critical factor that SEO companies of all sizes will have to concentrate on, and more importantly educate their clients on, is that SEO is not just about gaining search engine ranking; it is about the usability of the website, its conversion potential, its branding, and its social media reputation.
In a word TRAFFIC.
And for the cynics and conspiracy theorists maybe Google is talking about all these new changes like 'personalised search', 'load speed times' and 'live search' just to throw us of the scent and stop us looking at what the actual cause may be and that is the uncertainty of the caffeine roll out and its effect on search engine placement.
How will we be able to reach a target market if the search results are already 'geared' to show their competitor's brand? From our research and that of others the chances of a brand new website, targeting a competitive search query, will be very minimal of appearing in SERPs customised by personalisation, even with the best efforts of an SEO company.
If your client's website does not rank well now for their target search queries, they will slip even further and further as the users search is refined by their search activity and the using of websites already placed in those higher positions.
For those who have clients that do not 'opt-out' of personalisation and then visit their own websites may have a false impression that their website is ranking well and therefore not continue engage the services of an SEO company.
To add to this if they then visit their competitor's websites this may unwittingly gain them(their competitors) a higher ranking although the result of this is more likely just to create a false impression that their websites are not ranking well in the and one again blame their SEO company.
Companies / brands with greater search traffic will bet better placed to gain new business because searchers will see more impressions of snippets to their sites.
This does however create branding opportunities via snippets.
This in turn will lead to the possibility of ranking for the more generic search terms more profoundly difficult (as larger brands will tend to dominate based on market search share).
This will mean that SEO strategies using long tail search terms will become more the norm.
The top search engine competitors will fall down the ratings if their snippets and offerings are not competitive enough, allowing lower ranked sites to take over.
Complacency will see major changes in some of the most competitive niches.
On-site optimisation and link building can no longer have as much influence on their websites rank for competitive search queries.
Titles, META descriptions and text snippet optimisation will become SEO priorities once again with more emphasis than ever on locating less competitive search terms with high traffic.
It should also see you removing exceedingly 'spammy' web pages as their lack of popularity will increase the desire for these pages not to be chosen during a search.
These should be replaced by highly relevant and informative pages that are refreshed as often as possible to increase the users desire to re-visit the website and thus increase its search results potential.
Real-time content generated by Twitter, Facebook etc.
are also going to need fresh relative content and in greater volume.
With the advent of live search how much space will be left on page 1 for an abundance of organic results anyway.
Static websites are going to fall to oblivion.
Audience demographic targeting and snippet relevancy will become more important when optimising web page content.
This will also impact PPC ads as they will have to work harder and be more effective to compete with the increased brand-biased SERPs.
Google will of course be the biggest beneficiaries from its changes as PPC will become more and more popular as people find organic SEO too unpredictable and abandon it.
If in fact clicking on listings will be affecting search results and this begins to impact what users see, surely this will leave the door wide open for 'black hat' to reign supreme as software is developed to falsely click on those website wishing to be promoted.
Maybe the only alternative will be to start looking at using other search engines such as Bing as a viable source of traffic.
Have we convinced you that that SEO is now dead? Well let us just back up a little and try and get some true perspective to the situation.
Why Personalisation WILL NOT affect SEO: Personalisation has been in place for some time already - since 2005 in fact.
The only difference now is that rather than choosing to have it turned on it is automatically on and you choose to turn it off.
The first big change will be to see how the new 'caffeine' will affect our clients search results and the basis upon which we decide to SEO websites for this.
There is little chance of us being able to make the search engine user choose our clients website or be able to predict what will appeal regularly but it needs to be the best it can be.
We know as always we will be looking to second guess Google and ascertain some of the parameters that will be affected by caffeine and this area needs to be looked at first.
Most non-personalised search engine results are not identical these days anyway.
We have even noted differences for the same search query on same PC in the same location a few minutes apart.
Different data centres and Everflux between them mean constantly shifting search engine results.
The one most critical factor that SEO companies of all sizes will have to concentrate on, and more importantly educate their clients on, is that SEO is not just about gaining search engine ranking; it is about the usability of the website, its conversion potential, its branding, and its social media reputation.
In a word TRAFFIC.
And for the cynics and conspiracy theorists maybe Google is talking about all these new changes like 'personalised search', 'load speed times' and 'live search' just to throw us of the scent and stop us looking at what the actual cause may be and that is the uncertainty of the caffeine roll out and its effect on search engine placement.