Google seems to be on a roll presenting new features every other day this week and therefore I will cover them one after one and share my insight on how we can benefit. Today I will cover Personalized Search.
What is Personalized Search?
When you use Google and search for a term such as the movie [fight club] and then click on IMDb you will raise the value for this result. If you then continue to have a tendency to click on IMDb, Google will take advantage of your search history and rank it higher just for you.
Other times, when I’m looking for news about Cornell University’s sports teams, I search for [big red]. Because I frequently click on www.cornellbigred.com, Google might show me this result first, instead of the Big Red soda company or others.
What is New?
This feature is nothing new for us with a Google Account and to tell you the truth I have often wished for it to not be so. Way back it was giving me a headache every time I tried to see how my niche sites ranked without my personal history interfering the search results.
The difference now is that visitors without Google Accounts will experience the same thing thanks to customized search based upon 180 days of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser.
How to Benefit?
As I told you above this is nothing new for us with Google Accounts but that does not mean we can’t take advantage of this in the future. I would actually say this could be better for us since if you get hold of a visitor you will have a better chance of keeping him since you influences his search results.
Your main goal should be to get your visitors to click on your links in the Google SERP. I’m certain you can come up with your own methods, and I would love to hear them as well, but here are some examples.
- When helping someone over the phone or via mail, give him directions on how to find your pages on Google instead of giving him a direct URL.
- Link to SERPs in your blog posts and via mail.
- Make up a word or name and tell people to Google it. You might even become famous by doing so. How many know about the lemon law?
- Mention your keywords in advertising and tell people to Google it.
- Mention a keyword during an interview and relate to it somehow.
What are your preferred methods?
Video from Google Explaining it
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
That’s interesting, thanks for the heads up.
I prefer give someone direction how to find my site whenever he’s asking for help. By doing this, they would feel glad because I helped them and plus, this will build my authority and brand thou.
Wow! This is just a terrible idea from Google. I may say that is one that really would do more harm than good. I am just concerned about our privacy, because Google will need to spy on you, and watch the places you visit on the internet in order to bring you the personalized searches. I do not think it is a good idea. Everyone should be entitled to privacy.
Well i have never tried it. It looks promising. It will increase ur organic traffic as well.
This pretty much puts and “SEOs” into their place. The creation of websites shouldn’t be able optimizing your stuff for the search engines, it should be about creating content that people will click on.