Who are you Optimising for with Personalised Search?

Personalised search is definitely a big change as far as most SEOs see Google working. Never before have a user’s actions been (openly) included in the ranking algorithm. It is not surprising that this change sparked a lot of discussion.

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

3 Responses to “Who are you Optimising for with Personalised Search?”

1. Dan says:

   21/07/2010 at 9:40 AM

   I wonder if I’m Feeling Lucky, or Address Bar searches count?

   You could put I’m feeling lucky links in all your email marketing:

   http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=bbc+news&btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky&aq=f&aqi=g4g-s1g5&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

   Address bar searches seem to use gfns=1 to auto redirect to the first result:

   http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=0&q=bbc+news

   Would be worth checking out.
2. Jonaths says:

   21/07/2010 at 2:14 PM

   I could be way off here (I normally am), but from what I’ve seen I wouldn’t say personalised search is query dependent, just visit dependent. So imagine you regularly visit http://www.example.com, and that page has content for “widgets”, but you’ve never visited http://www.example.com/widgets, and you’ve certainly never Googled “example widgets”. So the first time you do a search for “widgets”, Google artificially increases the rankings for http://www.example.com/widgets.

   As you say, if someone searches for “example widget” and then bounces, then that perhaps isn’t a great signal that http://www.example.com should rank for “widgets”. But having said that, isn’t that exactly how Vince works? I’m confusing myself now.
3. Rob Green says:

   21/07/2010 at 5:15 PM

   @Dan – I think that’s a good idea to test, and it avoids sending people to the SERP where they could get lost.

   @Jonaths – From what I have seen, the personalisation of a results page only seems to favour a site that you have clicked through to from another (or the same) SERP. For what I was describing, the visit to the site wouldn’t have to be a bounced visit – but how much would a bounce from a site negatively affect a site’s ranking (in terms of Vince), against the potentially positive effect of you having visited that site (in terms of personalisation).

   Now I am getting confused as well!?!