SPIDERbytes

A new era is dawning on search marketing, the art of being found in the search engine listings for key search terms. Today’s efforts require great content on your web site, ensuring that the search engines find your site relevant for your key phrases, and gaining quality links from authoritative web sites to your own. 

 

When this is done effectively over an extended period of time, your web site has a good chance of standing up to other web competitors and can often be found among the top web sites in any key phrase search. 

 

However, personalized search is changing the rules entirely. Personalized search occurs when the search engines deliver results based on your personal search or web site visit history. With Google’s recent enabling of a “web history” feature, giving them permission to store your web site visit and search engine history, they are introducing results that are based on your own experience, presumably providing you with a set of results that is more in line with your interests. So, for example, if you search on “classic cars” consistently and visit American car model web sites, rather than foreign car web sites, you’d likely be shown more American car web site listings than others searching on the same phrase.

Besides introducing a slew of privacy concern issues and the massive amount of marketing data Google will have to exploit, this means that when this feature is enabled, we web marketers have even less control over our positioning than ever before. And, we have little if no data to tell us how our listings are appearing, because every personalized search could be different. 

 

Does this spell the end for search marketing? Does it mean that all our efforts to be found in the search engines will be in vane since there’s no way to measure how we will show up in any given search?

The answer is that while we may not know how everyone’s searches will appear, we know that the primary intent is to deliver high quality and relevant web listings for every search. The closer the search list is to the intent of the searcher, the better the searcher’s experience. This in no way changes the importance of being found in the search engines.  In fact, it raises the stakes, since searches will presumably be shown more relevant results. If your product or service is relevant for a personalized search, you definitely want to be found.

 

What it does mean is that it is becoming more and more difficult to translate a top listing into success. While being found for “non-personalized” searches will for the foreseeable future be a strong goal, the more important goal is to turn prospects into customers. This can only be measured by tracking the movements from a search engine to what a visitor does on your web site. 

 

The goal is customer conversion. One aspect of this is to be found through the search engines, and this just got a little harder to measure.