Is Personalized Search Really Ending Search Engine Optimization? Will Google's personalized search feature end search engine optimization or just simply require further innovation?	Visited: 3043 4.6/5.0 (16 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
by Jason Bland November 25, 2008

Recently, Google has been working on personalizing search results. If you don’t search within a Google Account, your rankings have been shifting based on your recent search activity. If you Google a keyphrase like “rattlesnake boots” then Google “rattlesnake skin boots”, you will see this at the top right of Google’s search results. “Customized based on recent search activity.”

So you might be thinking, “oh no, that is the end of SEO!” if everyone sees different results, how can one measure success? Fear not my good web marketer, for search engine optimization is not dead, it’s simply being upgraded.

The changes in Google’s personalized results have been monitored for a couple of years by my search engine optimization company. Being that we offer guaranteed search engine optimization, (guaranteeing page one rankings, not individual rankings) we were mildly concerned when Google started showing different results in different regions. And now, with this innovation, things are about to get different, not harder.

Basically, personalized search works around ranking monopolies. If you do a search for health insurance quotes, health insurance plans, and affordable health insurance, you are getting the same top two web sites for all three. So in your personalized search, just delete them. So the next time you search, you will be exposed to a few sites that you haven’t seen before and may have options that better suit you. Basically, personalized search increases visibility and fairness to web sites that don’t have ranking monopolies.

While personalized search may reduce traffic, it should increase conversion (in theory) because the visitors that are exposed to your web site have been because of their recent search history thus making them a more relevant visitor.

For regional search engine optimization, the changes will be minimal. National terms like “car” could go several directions. A searcher could be wanting to buy a car, looking for car repair tutorials, or simply wanting to read car blogs. General terms will be most effected by personalized search.

However, someone searching for a Houston immigration lawyer, or chiropractor, or insurance agent, will pretty much see the same results. Even with personalized search, your web site needs to have relevant content, clean code, properly formatted meta descriptions, descriptive text, descriptive image tags, and variety of relevant, quality web sites linking to it. All of these items need to be addressed so that your web site appears in the top ten of relevant search results.

The way I see it, personalized search is just another way search engines are becoming more relevant. I’m looking forward to implementing new services into our search engine optimization plans. This is what keeps this industry exciting.