From information about your location and device to searches you've performed in the past, Google now has a great deal of information it can use to personalize your search results. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains to what extent they're likely using that information and offers five ways in which you can improve your performance in personalized search.
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Video transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat personalization, talking about the elements that can influence personalization as well as some of the tactical things that web marketers and SEOs specifically can do to help make their sites and their content more personalized friendly.
How personalization works
So, what are we talking about when we're talking about personalization? Well, Google is actually personalizing by a large number of things and probably even a few things I have not listed here that they have not been totally transparent or forthcoming about.
Logged-in visitors
The things that we know about include things like:
- Location. Where is the searcher?
- Device. What type of device and operating system is the searcher using?
- Browser. We have seen some browser specific and operating specific forms of searches. Search history, things that you have searched for before and potentially what you've clicked on in the results.
- Your email calendar. So if you're using Gmail and you're using Google Calendar, Google will pull in things that they find on your calendar and data from your email and potentially show that to you inside of search results when you search for very particular things. For example, if you have an upcoming plane flight and you search for that flight number or search around that airline, they may show you, you have an upcoming flight tomorrow at 2:07 p.m. with Delta airlines.
- Google+. A lot of folks are thinking of it as dead, but it's not particularly dead, in fact no more so than the last year and a half or so. Google+ results will still appear at the bottom of your search results very frequently if you're logged in and anyone in your Google+ stream that you follow has shared any link or any post in Google+ with the keywords that you've searched for. That's a very broad matching still. Those results can appear higher if Google determines that there's more relevancy behind that. You'll also see Google+ data for people you're connected to when you search for them, that kind of thing.
- Visit history. If you have visited a domain while logged into an account many times in the past, I'm not exactly sure how many times or what sort of engagement they look at precisely, but they may bias those results higher. So they might say, "Gosh, you know, you really seem to like eBay when you do shopping. We're going to show eBay's results for you higher than we would normally show them in an incognito window or for someone who's not logged in or someone who isn't as big an eBay fan as you are."
- Bookmarks. It's unclear whether they're using just the bookmarks from Google Chrome or the personalization that carries over from Chrome instances or the fact that bookmarks are also things that people visit frequency. There's some discussion about what the overlap is there. Not too important for our purposes.
Logged-out visitors
If you are logged out, they still have a number of ways of personalizing, and you can still observe plenty of personalization. Your results may be very different from what you see in a totally new browser with no location applied to it, on a different device with different search and visit history.
Now, remember when I say "Logged out," I'm not talking about an incognito window. An incognito window would bias against showing anything based on search history or visit history. However, location and device appear to still remain intact. So a mobile device is going to get sometimes different results than a desktop device. Different locations will get different results than other locations. All that kind of stuff.
Now you might ask, "Quantify this for me, Rand." Like let's say we took a sample set of 500 keywords and we ran them through personalized versus non-personalized kinds of searches. What's the real delta in the results ordering and the difference of the results that we see?
Well, we actually did this. It's almost 18 months old at this point, but Doctor Pete did this in late 2013. Using the MozCast data set, he checked crawlers, Google Webmaster Tools, personalized logged in and incognito. You know what? The delta was very small for personalized versus incognito. I suspect that number's probably gone up, which means this correlation number -- 1.0 would be perfect correlation -- 0.977 very, very high correlation. So we're seeing really similar results for personalized versus incognito at least 18 months ago.
I suspect that's probably changed. It'll probably continue to change a little bit. However, I would also say that it probably won't drop that low. I would not expect that you would ever find that it'll be lower than 0.8, maybe even 0.9, just because so much of search is intentional navigation and so much of it is also not fully capable to be personalized in truly intelligent ways. The results are the best results already. There's not a whole lot of personalization that might be added in besides potentially showing your Google+ follows or something at the bottom and things based on your visit history.
Performing better in personalized search
So let's say you want to perform better in personalized search. You have a belief that, hey, a lot of people are getting personalized bias in my particular SERP sets. We're very local focused, or we're very biased by social kinds of data, or we're seeing a lot of people are getting biased in their results to our competitors because of their search history and visit history. What are things that I need to think about?
Get potential searchers to know and love your brand before the query
The answer is you can perform better in personalized search in general, overall by thinking about things like getting potential searchers to know and love your brand and your domain before they ever make the query. It turns out that if you've gotten people to your site previously through other forms of navigation and through searches, you may very well find yourself higher up in people's personalized results as a consequence of the fact that they visited you in the past. We don't know all the metrics that go into that or what precisely Google uses, but we could surmise that there are probably some bars around engagement, visit history, how many times, how frequently in a certain time frame, all that kind of stuff that goes into that search and visit history.
Likewise, if you can bias people here and rank higher, you may be getting more and more benefit. It can be a snowball effect. So if you keep showing up higher in their rankings, they keep clicking you, they keep finding information that's useful, they don't need to go back to the search results and click somebody else. You're just going to keep ranking in more and more of their queries as they investigate things. For those of you who are full funnel types of content servers, you're thinking about people as they're doing research and educating themselves all the way down to the transaction level with their searches, this is a very exciting opportunity.
Be visible in all the relevant locations for your business
For location bias, you want to make sure that you are relevant in all the locations for your business or your service. A lot of times that means getting registered with Google Maps and Google+ local business for maps -- I can't remember what it's called exactly. I think it's Google+ Local for Business -- and making sure that you are not only registered with those places but then also that your content is helping to serve the areas that you serve. Sometimes that can even mean a larger radius than what Google Maps might give you. You can rank well outside of your specific geographies with content that serves those regions, even if Google is not perfectly location connecting you via your address or your Maps registration, those kinds of things.
Get those keyword targets dialed in
Getting keyword targeting dialed in, this is important all the time. Where a lot of people fall down in this is they think, "Hey, I only need to worry about keyword targeting on the pages that are specifically intended to be search landing pages. I'm trying to get search traffic to these pages." But personalization bias means that if you can get keyword targeting dialed in even on pages that are not necessarily search landing pages, Google might say, "Hey, this wouldn't normally rank for someone, but because you've already earned that traffic, because that person is already biased to your brand, your domain, we're going to surface that higher than we ordinarily would." That is a powerful potential tool in your arsenal, hence it's useful to think about keyword targeting on a page specific level even for pages that you might not think would earn search traffic normally.
Share content on Google+ and connect with your potential customers
Google+ still, in my opinion, a very valuable place to earn personalized traffic for two reasons. One, of course you can get people actually over to your site. You may be able to get potential traffic through Google+. You can appear in those search results right at the bottom for anyone who follows you or anyone who's connected to you via email and other kinds of Google apps. You may have also noticed that when you email with someone, if they're using Gmail and their Google+ account is connected, you see in the little right-hand corner there that they'll show their last post or their last few posts sometimes on Google+. Again, also a powerful way to connect with folks and to share the content as you're emailing back and forth with them.
For brands, that also shows up in search results sometimes. There's the brand box on the right-hand side, kind of like Knowledge Graph, and it'll show your last few posts from Google+. So again, more and more opportunities to be visible if you're doing Google+.
I am also going to surmise that, in the future, Google might do stuff with this around Twitter. They just finished re-inking that deal where Twitter gives their full fire hose access to Google and Google starts displaying more and more of that stuff in search results. So I think probably still valuable to think about how that connection might form. Definitely still valuable directly to do it in Google+ even if you're not getting any traffic from Google+.
Be multi-device friendly and usable
Then the last one, of course, being multi-device friendly and usable. This is something where Moz has historically fallen down, and obviously we're going to be fixing that in the months ahead. I actually hope we fix it after April 21st so we can see whether we really take a hit when they do that mobile thing. I think that would be a noble sacrifice, and then we can see how we perform thereafter and then fix it and see if we can get back in Google's good graces after that.
So given these tactics and some of this knowledge about how personalized search works, hopefully you can take advantage of personalized search and help inform your teams, your bosses, your clients about personalization and the potential impacts. Hopefully we'll be redoing some of those studies, too, to be able to tell you, hey, how much more is personalization affecting SEO over the last 18 months and in the years ahead.
All right, everyone. Thanks again for joining us, and we'll see you again next time for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Hi Rand,
If you end up fixing the mobile thing after the 21st, are you then planning to make a blog post about it or share the data? I think it would be really interesting to see just how big of an effect the new update will have on the results. We have some clients who won't be able to fix it before the 21st, so it would be extra nice with some data/real example of how big of an effect is has and especially how to then bounce back from it.
Good suggestion. A few points:
We will definitely share all the data we gather and the conclusions we reach!
Hi Cyrus,
Thanks for the reply, I'm very much looking forward to see that data!
Hi Rand,
personalization of SERPs (but it is maybe better telling, personalization of the Google ecosystem) is a favorite topic of mine since a long time.
Here on Moz I published several posts about personalization:
Despite being not so so recent blog posts, almost everything described there is still actual.
For once, then, I won't be "too humble" affirming how what I previewed back in December 2013 (post: The Shape of Things to Come) has become partly real during these last months. I am especially talking in everything related to the importance of "sensors" and data from mobile. As I was writing in that post, Google acquired Wavii and the team of Behav.io, and now we started seeing the consequences of those (and others) acquisitions.
Gianluca Fiorelli, I agree with you on the importance of sensors and data from mobile and believe they provide essential data for real-time personalized search and I'm very curious as to how augmented reality will join in the mix. It will a be a very personalized world, don't you think?
Maybe too much personalized...
I've been actually wondering in the past what exactly Google can do with the location history they have. Besides the fact that it's kind of fun to see where exactly I've been, I wasn't able to find any evidence (yet) to any kind of effect on the personalized results. But I'm sure it's coming.
If I'm going to the same Target store once a week, and the same beach twice a year, it would make sense to use that data for the related search terms.
Look at what Google now suggests you depending on your location: it changes.
Or do a search like "restaurants", and you'll see personalization in action.
Too much, I agree soon enough there will not be anymore optimization for the masses. Its enough fun to figure out an algo with 100+ variables. But then add devices, search location, habits and history. Woo Hoo then pretty soon in the future a rudimentary A.I. helping to produce search results.
Fun Times
Personalized search results are cool, but damn, this is an invasion of privacy (didn't know they were using email calendar to personalize search results).
Congratulations on your information, I have found it a very interesting post . the key is to use all the tools at the right time
Brilliant Rand! Google+ is so often bashed as a social network, but it truly is underrated for its SERP powers!
Visibility in local search is an interesting topic, especially since it is one of the signals that permeates through logged in, logged out and incognito searching. I remember you doing a WBF on targeting areas with specific where you don't have a physical address and therefore a Google maps listing - it is something that we get approached by a lot of the time and using this personalisation in line with area targeting can produce significant results.
An interesting point from Google's perspective is getting the engagement and history right. It has to be really tied in with user intent because if you were researching a product, a website with a lot of information but not necessarily the right product might attract and retain users when they are at the top of the 'funnel' and then rank higher with personalised search when the user is looking to buy (even though they may not have the right product). I'm sure Google will find a clever way to figure it out..
As a small business owner I am so interested in the changes after 4/21 arena of search & making it on page 1 with the serps...thanks
I agree that the opportunities for full funnel marketers are strong in personalised search. Google Plus proved valuable for me when serving content to users who were becoming brand loyal. It's a bit of a catch 22, They like some of your content, your future content is served higher. Generally it's of a similar tone so they like that too. The cycle continues.
This is an excellent overview of how to “personalize” your website for the visitor’s benefit. What are your thoughts for better personalizing content that serves a particular region? What’s an approach that will generally work anytime, anywhere?
The gap between.. What do I need? and We already know what you need. Keeps getting smaller and smaller.
I've always had mixed feelings about how the personalized searches populate and rank organic listings. Seems like that was the reason of PPC.. How can we consider this good for organic search engine marketing? Organic listings have always in my mind been determined based on how all users (as a group) interact and that determines who gets ranked higher in the SERPs... Seems like the organic listings aren't that organic anymore. One way or another seo still exist and we always have found a way to ethically work with the updates guidelines.
The advice on how to take advantage of these aspects to make a positive site impact were greatly appreciated. Thanks.
Great, thanks for this session. Any sense on the percentage of users who are typically logged in on desktop and mobile? It would be interesting to know as to invest time and effort accordingly.
serps, local seo, keyword search, a nice mix!! :-)
Talking about personalize search is there any difference when we search on mobile and searches on pc/laptop/desktop?
I get this, but Rand! On the other hand, why are unpersonalized search growing in popularity? Is DuckDucKGo or search engines like it are the future of search?
Great suggestions, will follow your advises to upgade our website's webpages.
you are right
Rand i have a question for you, if i am gonna change my name for commenting blog frequently to promote any keywords for a website, so is this an authentic way?
Hello Rand, nice WDF again.
I Want to ask one thing, piggy-back in search result hurt through personalization or it hurts in overall ranking through algorithmic or both?
Hi Rand Fishkin, I really appreciate your idea on writing ideas for posts, etc. every single day. That’s how you get better at this craft of writing. You have a great topic that a lot of people need to read and hear.
Hi Rand,
Your article reminded me of that one often overlooked variable where Google+ helps to rank articles through social circles. I suppose this has been in the know for a long time now but with so much shifting in the SEO world today this is a great key on reassessing interpersonal strategies. I've found Google+ a bit challenging to fully develop a strong growth strategy beyond leveraging inner circles. This to me is a reminder to take another look to see if there could be a new understanding to growing connections through this medium.
The idea of using informational content to hook searches in the first part of their purchase journey and using this to bring them back at a latter stage is something we have been working on for a while. From what we have seen it does help promote your site for related search terms when it wouldn't otherwise rank as well for. It would be interesting to run some PPC on cheap information searches and/or market defining keywords and see if this could be used to improve organic results for a personalised search.
LSIversen,
I have a feeling the topic will be covered a lot.
Keep in mind that Google's algo change will have an entirely different effect on different types of sites.
While I'm not aware of the exact numbers for the desktop/mobile share for Moz, I do remember a couple of tweets in which it was mentioned that the mobile share is currently very low. And it makes sense because of the nature of the site.
Sites that barely get any traffic from Mobile today, how significant can the effect be for them comparing to sites that review local businesses (for example) and get over 80% of traffic from Mobile?
Howdy Rand, awesome WBF as always.
You mentioned something I love to discuss about:
I never believed for a second that G+ is dead, and still lot of the traffic (and juice probably) my blog receives is from G+. And I really don't know why people argued so much over G+ and the Authorship Mark.
I mean, there are a lot of wonderful creative writers that don't get the credit for their work. Imagine if authorship mark didn't "die", all of those unknown writers may get the world to know them.
Rand,
Not sure I follow you when you talk about incognito mode. My understanding is that incognito mode does not store information. It does NOT mean, it has no access to the already stored info. They only thing they are not using according to their privacy terms is existing cookies, as that would identify you to the sites you visit. That would explain the very small delta.
The guest mode might behave different, at least to some extent.
https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95464?sou...
So, for testing not-personalized info, the guest mode is better.
A very intriguing post Rand! I would say that personalized search is more dependent on your existence on Google plus and the circle you are having there. I have seen quite a bit of traffic driven through personalized serach to websites of my clients and I personally believe the reason behind that was their mammoth Google plus circles.
*Rand: Another excellent Whiteboard Friday. I love your G+ comment: "A lot of folks are thinking of it as dead, but it's not particularly dead, in fact no more so than the last year and a half or so."
Among my assignments, I have actively managed a G+ corporate site for a couple years+, and have tried to study and implement successful trends. As much as I love G+ and it's features, it seems like Google is its own BIGGEST enemy in growing G+ use and popularity. Their "corporate communications" and "customer support" is horrendously poor, compared to other platforms like LinkedIn.
Seems like if Google would just put in a consistent effort on those two elements, people would be drawn to it. It's an amazing a tool.
Good to hear some positive things about it though. Thank you.
Loved this WBF. I have to agree with others about G+. Google just keeps trying to make it happen without improving the platform and making a place for consumer to be. The biggest reason it is used is for the SERP benefits. Really Google is doing with G+ what most people do with blogs. They have it for the wrong reasons. Google penalizes sites that focuses on just SEO factors and technical aspects. They try to find the best site for consumers and users.
G+ needs more than just SERP benefits, it is a form of blackmail really.
HI Rand..
very nice topic for new site owners this are the key important things to consider for targeting local market. i think personalized search will be less but those less visitors would be your customers for sure.
yes