Optimising for personalised search

The theory behind this, to my knowledge, is that if you can get users to click through to your site from a SERP for a “Brand + keyword” search, rather than going direct, that action should help your site rank higher next time they search for a “keyword” search.

Generally, it seems that the main way people are suggesting you do this is by saying “Google ____ to find us” in offline advertising. This is an attempt to make the main call to action a Google search, followed by a click through to your site, rather than a direct visit.

I have no problem with this theory, but I think that a lot of people are missing two valid reasons why this may not actually have that much benefit.

1. You are optimising for people that have already been to your site

You have attracted a customer through (say) a TV ad. They follow your call to action, and Google “Rob Green’s cheap bicycles”, and then clicks through. The only benefit you are going to have for appearing top for “cheap bicycles” is if they have forgotten who you are since the original search. Otherwise they obviously went to your site, didn’t find what they wanted, and then tried their search again at another time.

Optimising for Personalised search like this is trying to convince people who are already well aware of your brand, and have already visited your site, to visit again – unlike normal SEO where you attract new customers that are potentially a lot more valuable. I suppose you could look at it as trying to retain lost customers, but I don’t feel it’s as powerful a tool, or as wide reaching as standard marketing.

2. You better own that SERP

SERPs have a lot of results on them. You can’t guarantee that users are going to click through on the first Organic result. If you are bidding on the term you are telling everyone to Google, any PPC clicks are going to cost you, and they will have no impact on personalised search.

To conclude

I don’t think that this idea is necessary a terrible one, I just find it a strange segment of users to target. To try to gain a marginal SEO benefit by changing your main call to action to something that has the potential to lose users, who you have already won over with another marketing channel, would not be something I would be totally comfortable recommending.

In my opinion it is more than likely that someone who has been convinced to search for “Rob Green’s cheap bicycles”, who then visits my site, then goes back to Google to search “cheap bicycles”, is very unlikely to click through to my site again. They tried it once; they can’t have liked it that much, because they had to try again.

Image courtesy of @The Plate Market

In what way does the rel=canonical tag solve any international SEO problems?

I’m really confused on this one; some SEOs are suggesting that this tag in some way helps with duplicate content issues with same-language content, targeted at different countries. I have heard this at a conference too.

The rel=canonical tag states which page, of any number, is the official source of the content. This is great for if there are URLs that sometime have parameters on the end of them, which can cause dupe content issues, or if you publish the same content across a number of domains but have a particular versions that you want to rank, with all the link juice that the copies may have attracted.

I get that.

How can that help with international SEO?

It cannot.

Let’s say I have a piece of German language content that I want to serve to users in Germany, users in Austria, and users in Switzerland. Now let’s say that this content is very similar, and sits within:

• mysite.com/de/content/ (with the /de/ folder correctly geo-targeted to Germany)
• mysite.com/at/content/ (with the /at/ folder correctly geo-targeted to Austria)
• mysite.com/ch/content/( with the /ch/ folder correctly geo-targeted to Switzerland)

I now potentially have the problem where the one page ranks in Google.de, Google.at and Google.ch because one page has been picked as the original, and the others have been classed as duplicates. I could now be sending all German, Austrian and Swiss users to one site, and this page may not rank very well in the two versions of Google that do not relate to its location.

In what way is the rel=canonical tag going to help me here? I could consolidate all the links that these pages have, but that would ensure that the wrong page ranks in two of the three countries (if it ranks at all in those countries). Instead of hoping that the right page ranks, I am ensuring that Google consolidates the three pages to one.

This would be the case whether you are using country specific sub-folders, sub-domains, or ccTLDs for your “international SEO strategy”.

Where is the Confusion?

Google suggest using the tag as an alternative to 301 redirects, which is the way they want you to deal with duplicate content if you cannot implement redirects. You would not effectively redirect all your same-language content to one place would you? No.

What’s the solution?

There are three things you need to do:

• Make these pages unique
• Geo-target their locations
• Build localised links to these pages

Leave the canonical tag out of these discussions, please.

Flickr image via lougedo

How have we come so far without it?

Marketing, in general, should be treated like any other trade; you can learn it with experience. Digital marketing (and SEO) should be especially examinable – this isn’t “blue sky” jerks sitting in a glass room imagineering a new billboard campaign, this is search engine optimisation.

If this is the case, an individual or an agency should be able to gain some sort of award or qualification to prove their knowledge and experience – however basic. PPC has the Google Adwords Qualifications so that an agency can become Adwords certified, so why is something similar impossible for SEO?

However complicated and clever people tell you SEO is, the fundamentals are logical.

Possible Problems

I tried to think of the problems with this idea, and here are two biggies that I came up with:

• It would require some sort of SEO Council to come together, and run the scheme.
• It would require the buy-in from some top agencies and individuals to gain credibility.

These might be large obstacles, but wouldn’t the SEO community benefit from having some sort of standards to deter the sharks, and having some well researched learning materials for new SEOs to use? It wouldn’t be breaking the magicians code – just outlining the accepted fundamentals.

Who Would be on the “Council”?

Why is there no UK body that can act as an authority on SEO? It wouldn’t take a great deal of time to get together some training material that, say, 10 well known freelance and agency SEOs agreed on – and surely contributing to this group would raise the profile of that individual or agency sufficiently to make it worthwhile?

Surely a Good Thing?

A recognised training body and the related cerifications would only help educate more people about the best practices for SEO, and this will only aid the people looking to sell “advanced” SEO services, as long as you aren’t trying to sell people rubbish. The material would only cover the hard-and-fast basics that are not up for discussion, and I don’t see why Google shouldn’t be involved in it. For that matter, why isn’t there a “Google Webmaster” qualification based in the Google guidelines for webmasters?!?

I can’t see any negative effects of having some sort of SEO standards test that can be taken, that can also allow agencies to become accredited if all their SEOs have passed.

….maybe a bit “pie in the sky”, but why not?

Flickr image from m00by

What really frustrated me, when I was still in my sceptic phase, was the sheer volume of people telling me either how great Twitter is, or how to use it, or why I practically must start using it for fear of being so far behind I might never catch up. This led to a lot of people talking about the massive growth in “buzz” for the site, and if interest was to keep growing at this rate, Twitter would be bigger than every social media platform ever, ever.

Well, the “buzz” seems to be dropping off – and I think this is because of the amount of people who have probably tried it, and realised that they don’t really need, or want it.

Don’t get me wrong – I think that Twitter if often very useful for what I use it for, but I never thought it would “catch-on” in the way that everyone kept saying it would. – Here’s to the platform that actually does do “micro-blogging” and doesn’t make me listen to people talking about making a cup of tea!

Background

So, a few UK SEO’s have been talking, at length, and for some time, about the UK SERP’s being “broken”. During this time, they also seem to be getting more and more frustrated that they are not getting any response from Google on the matter. I think there is good reason they are getting no response.

An Example

A recent example of a SERP that has been highlighted would be “compare adsl broadband plans“. This query returns a lot of Australian results, to which UK SEO’s seem to be throwing their hands up in disbelief. “I am in the UK – why am I getting Oz sites in my results?!?”.

The [Simple] Explanation…

If you search for a query that is much more commonly used in another English speaking country, you are going to get a lot of results from that country. Whether or not you think this is the way it should work, that is the reality.

In the example above, Australians use the term “broadband plans” a hell of a lot more than we do in the UK. We say “broadband packages”, and this query (”compare adsl broadband packages“) returns UK results. Only people that happen to use search terms that are rarely used in their country are going to get foreign results – them and SEO’s doing search term research.

Even SEO’s needn’t really worry about this in my book, because these SERP’s are a clear indication that the search term you are considering optimising for is not generally used much in the UK. There are a lot of queries that return foreign results (try “real estate” or something equally as non-UK-ish), and I am sure that the majority of them do so because the query that is being used is most often used, and therefore associated with, the country of the sites that are being returned.

Covering my Back….

I am sure there are queries that genuinely are returning some results that are not relevant, and I am sure that if reported, these would be looked at. I just think that jumping to the conclusion that the UK SERP’s are “broken” may just be the easy option, not the correct one.

[I am also willing to accept that there are occasions when there are map results that are showing, perhaps, a US area instead of a UK one.]

Finally

I’m not saying that there are no location issues with any UK SERP’s, or that this totally explains any strange results. But I think it explains a good deal of them, and I don’t think the occasional foreign result in a (very) niche UK SERP is something that should be playing on an SEO’s mind.

Flickr image from Chris Bury

“We spent a lot of time researching best practice online. We then threw out everything we had learned, and just designed something that pleased us visually.”

This, is my mind, is one of the most ridiculous things someone could say – and its not something that would inspire me to work with an agency. Even with this in mind – I don’t know what annoyed me more, the arrogance of these designers, or the attitude of the people leaving comments on the post.

Reactions

My first reaction when looking at the site was “Wow – I find this site really hard to use,  I don’t think this is going to convert very well at all.” But after browsing around a bit, I changed my mind slightly. It was strange, but everything was there, and you could make purchases.

Many of the comments included “industry experts” reeling off reasons that the site was wrong – and yes, in their eyes there is definitely a right and wrong way. I am willing to accept that there are a set of rules that most eCommerce site abide by in order to maximise the sales that they make, but these guys (yes, they were all guys) were not even willing to entertain a different opinion.

This led to some responses from a woman using very strange marketing jargon to describe the “experience” of the site, and some more sensible women saying they actually really like the site, and had made purchases.

Get Off Your High Horse

I am not saying that I don’t really rate the Econsultancy site reviews, ‘cos I do. And I am not saying that there weren’t some valid comments like “I wonder if sales have seen an increase after the launch?” and “I wonder how the site will perform in 6 months time?”. It just grinds my gears when people start with a “well, in this industry….” and end with a “…and I should know”. They are equally as bad as the jargon-talking agency people that have sold this “vision” to Whistles.

Being able to entertain two conflicting opinions is one of the best signs of intelligence.

Flickr image from DailyM

Let me tell you the things I don’t like:

• There are 14 paid ads and 10 natural results. Not right.
• Creditcards.co.uk is a basic affiliate site – I reckon it is at #2 purely because of the domain name.
• Moneygem and AOL on the first page? Really? Do they really give the user that much value?
• There are only 3 actual credit card providers!

I genuinely believe that this SERP is a lot less useful than the Google SERP.

Flickr image from Dave Ward Photography

This Data is Important!

What you choose to report on can either be the basis of what drives your future actions, or be the thing that sends you off persuing something that isn’t driving any real results. That’s why reporting, although dull, is really, really important. That’s why I find charts like this so irratating:

Yes, this is a chart from an SEO agency with a lot of clients, and I don’t know where to start with how ridiculous this is. Why are page views such a good thing? Do you either “have” SEO, or “not have” SEO? Where the hell did they get this data?!?

What is the Most Accurate Competitor Analysis?

So what is an accurate way to show how a website is performing against its competitors in a given market? Assuming that you don’t have detailed analytics data on all of your, or your client’s, competitors – any revenue or conversion stats are out of the question. This only leaves us with three measures that can give us an indication of our performance:

• a website’s rankings for a particular set of terms on any given date
• the estimated search volumes for that set of terms
• and the estimated click-through rates for positions in the SERPs

Visibility alone does not give a good picture of how you are doing – if you are only reporting on how many terms you are ranking for, or how many terms you are on the first page for, this could be really misleading because you may be ranking for all the low search volume terms, and your competitors may be ranking for only a handful of really high volume terms, and they could getting a lot more traffic because of that.

This is the 10 sites with the most rankings for a set of travel terms

This is the same 10 sites with the estimated traffic they are getting from their visibility

By using the search volumes, and estimated click through rates, to give an indication of of the kind of traffic different sites are getting you can really see who is getting the most out of their visibility for your set of search terms.

I am not against showing who has the most visibility for a set of terms, but make sure you are looking at who has the most of the best positions, and use some traffic data to give a different view of the top players in your market. This data will put some kind of scale to the numbers, and if the people you are reporting to do not understand this, you haven’t explained yourself properly. They should appreciate it, especially is you can visualise it for them.

I’m not going to tell you exactly what I do, but this data, and how you visualise it’s change over time, is a big deal in my opinion.

Flickr image from Susan & her 5d

In the same way, if you come across a SERP for a niche term that is equally mixed, or contains results that do not suit your audience, move on. Its now your job to find out the variation of that term that does give the user (a user interested in your site) the best results; a place where they are much more likely to click-through. I have heard a lot of talk about SERPs that are ‘broken’ – but what’s the point dwelling on this when your time is surely much better spent optimising for the terms that people are using, and they are getting the best results. If you know what term people use after seeing a ‘broken’ SERP, then that is the one you need to be visible for.

Any SERP that get any decent amount of traffic that is genuinely showing bad results will get sorted, I am sure. Anything more than reporting a SERP and moving on is holding you up from doing your most productive work – optimising for terms that are going to give you, or your clients, results.

You might also want to check out another really popular post written by me about links in Google’s snippet text.