Google Gets Personal

Google announced this week a new personalization service that will impact the natural search results that consumers experience over time as they continue to search.  This capability will be given to searchers, even if they have not opted in to the existing personalization service. The new process will monitor individual user selections over time and present natural search results driven by this past behavior.  There are ramifications of this new process for advertisers trying to drive higher rankings leveraging Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Consumers will click on what they know.
Our first hypothesis is that consumers will click on what they know (i.e., known brands). The personalization algorithm will recognize this behavior and create a self reinforcing mechanism — selection of known brands will cause them to continue to appear, while unknown brands will be pushed down regardless of SEO efforts.  This creates a tricky barrier for new brands and brand launches, against entrenched competitors.

Ramifications:

• In order to drive results in SEO in a personalized world, advertisers will have to ensure that the actual text, i.e., the messaging that drives a click through, shows up — much like PPC creative.
• Link building will become relatively less influential and will be used to actually drive traffic to and from other websites.
• Non-title and META tags will become less influential.

Ranking, as a measure of SEO effectiveness, is going to become far more volatile, and therefore far less effective.
Advertisers need to ensure that they are measuring effectiveness of natural search based on onsite behavior, as well as ranking.   Advertisers need a comprehensive understanding of the SEO health of the pages in the website and ability to monitor this consistently.  Improvement or degradation of results will be less apparent through a ranking analysis. Changes in onsite traffic and engagement will be measured through the web analytics system and will be a truer measure of SEO effectiveness.

Technologies will have to change.
There are many technologies on the market that look at brand presence on the search engines by evaluating ranking of Search Engine Results Page (SERP) results for keyword sets.  First, these systems have to “opt out” of the personalization process so as not to skew their own results to an advertiser.  And advertisers will have to disable their own internal “official” analyses of ranking or they will be skewed by the personalization selections of each individual analyst.

Covario plans to study personalization closely in order to understand if we see significant variance in ranking from an “opted out state” to a personalized state to see how big an issue this is.

Communication around personalization will be driven by the SEO team to their respective organizations.
How many SEO people get emails or calls from senior execs in the company about “why is my brand number 8 on Google for this or that keyword?” Imagine how much more fun that conversation will become with personalization.  SEO teams and their agencies have to take the lead to educate the organization about these changes. We recommend that when this communication goes out, it is backed up with an action plan for the Brand Managers that says — “we are going to keep a close eye on SEO health of our sites, and diligently measure what really matters — onsite behavior.” Report formats should be updated in Q1 to ensure that a baseline is set for how personalization will impact on site result analysis for SEO.

Personalization is a win for large advertisers as they have the most developed brands, which should benefit most from this process.
From a consumer standpoint, however one of the advantages of the current “opt out” process is that unique results are presented which test consumer knowledge of a particular search topic. Personalization essentially reinforces the concept of “I don’t know what I don’t know” and won’t challenge the consumer with alternative listings.

Actionable Insight #1:  Increase your focus on Tag content
SEO practices around personalization on Google will require increased focus on Tag content to ensure that it is relevant — much like PPC creative — to drive consumer selection and leverage the dynamics of the personalization process. Link building will become less effective directly — as time-series consumer selection will become the dominant factor in an individual’s SERP, not context.

Actionable Insight #2:  Adjust your metrics
Using ranking as a metric of SEO effectiveness will become troublesome, as results will be skewed from traditional SEO ranking.  Onsite behavior — both SEO health through comprehensive and regular auditing, and traffic to site as measured by web analytics will be key.

Rank analysis technologies will have to be updated to provide reliable statistics about onpage brand presence.  Study will need to be done in order to understand what the divergence between an “average personalized” SERP and an “opted out” SERP look like.  Covario will be doing these studies and will share with our customers upon completion.

Actionable Insight #3:  Increase communication with stakeholders
SEO experts need to communicate changes to reporting structure and to internal brand stakeholders so they understand why they will experience more volatile SERPs for their programs.

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