How Your SEO Can Benefit from Personalization

Personalization climbed its way to the top of dominant marketing strategies in the last two years. According to recent surveys, as much as 90% of US consumers consider marketing personalization somewhat or very appealing. Similarly, 80% of frequent shoppers choose only the brands that offer at least some degree of personalized experience.

Naturally, some forms of marketing lend themselves to this innovation pretty well. But, how do these factors fare when we put them in the context of SEO – a marketing technique that is mostly concerned with the technical aspects of users' search habits?

The answer is surprisingly well.

Every search engine results page (SERP) the average user gets at the end of a query is to some extent personalized around their needs. Leveraging this fact and producing content that’s either personalized for some group of users or capable of utilizing Google's personalization mechanisms can only bear stronger results.

Let us see how this works in a couple of real-life examples.

1. Improving the customer experience

Although Google tends to be very secretive about the factors they consider when ranking the websites, the overall goal of the tech giant is to improve the overall customer experience. This quality, on the other hand, can be observed through a couple of very tangible metrics like:

• Bounce rate: The percent of users leaving the website after only visiting a landing page. At the moment, the average bounce rate sits at about 58.2%.
• Time spent on site: This metric offers the best insight when observed together with bounce rate.
• Average pages per visit: A number of pages the users interact with before exiting the website.

All these three factors can be tinkered with by the extent of personalization. When the users enter a website they’re more likely to stay longer and click through several pages if they find personalized and relevant content.

2. Leveraging the location

Present-day search engines are more than suited to personalize the search results based on the user’s specific location. Of course, the results are still not on par with more direct advertising methods like pay-per-click strategies. In this regard, SEO still lags behind more direct pay-per-click platforms like Google Ads. For instance, hiring an AdWords agency in Australia to corner the local market will most certainly bear much stronger short-term results than using the location keywords.

However, it’s hard to deny that the content that is contextually relevant to some topic and features a location has a much better chance of being spotlighted by Google if the search intent is relevant to the users’ location.

3. Increasing the customer demand

In this day and age, we’ve long ago moved past the old ‘one-size-fits-all’ rule. Users have grown accustomed to customized content and very specific targeting. If they don't find the content built around their needs, they will quickly lose interest and move to another place where their demands will be more adequately satisfied. On the other hand, whenever users come in contact with a personalized online experience, they will keep coming back to that web location wanting more. This behavior will have a positive effect on all metrics Google takes into consideration when assembling the future SERPs.

4. Language selection and cultural context

Companies aiming for an international audience often experience a problem with appealing to different demographics scattered around the globe. Naturally, Google will try to assemble the SERP out of pages that are localized to the region of the world the user comes from. The problem here lies in the very process of localization. Companies that are producing only surface-level personalization tend to simply translate the English pages to the local language without taking into consideration the nuances of the local phraseology and cultural context.

These practices ramp up bounce rates and cut the time spent on the site. A higher level of localization and segmentation, in contrast, leads to much stronger overall SEO results.

5. Using previous search history

As soon as people check an image or open some page they are leaving a digital footprint that can never be truly erased. The search engines will try to collect as much of these crumbs as possible and tailor the search results tailored entirely around the personal interests you have experienced in the past.

The problem with this concept is that, unlike search engines, the marketers don’t really have the access to data bits like browser and search history, so they’re forced to base their SEO efforts on very vague assumptions. However, paying close attention to analytic tools and the types of content that drive the most traffic can help us backtrack these numbers to use case scenarios and create high-performing personalized content for the specific types of users.

The challenges of personalization in the context of SEO

Now, we would like to point out that even though higher levels of personalization help the process of search engine optimization, employing this marketing strategy also presents a couple of technical challenges:

• Site speed: Content and scripts often load asynchronously slowing down the site and dragging down the SERP score.
• Cloaking: User segregation sometimes means that you are presenting one type of content to the users and another entirely to crawling bots, a practice search engines can interpret as foul play.
• Duplication: Similar content with minor differences necessary used for more precise personalization can be interpreted as duplicate and thus dilute its visibility.

Of course, these obstacles can be avoided with various technical interventions but, in order to do that the SEO experts need to be aware of their existence in the first place.

Final thoughts

As we can see, although personalization doesn’t affect the SEO rankings in some more tangible manner, the connections are there and this marketing approach can be used to back up the SEO strategies you have in place. However, you need to be careful since overly dramatic attempts at personalization can have a negative impact on the technical aspects of SEO. However, as long as you remember what your priorities are, you’ll be able to fit personalization comfortably into your established online marketing portfolio.