How To Fight Personalization — Is It Possible?

Google has made no secret of its excitement over personalized search results. This only makes sense. After all, the goal is for them to achieve unspammable results (Ha!). Unfortunately, this has left some webmasters and Internet marketers unsure of where they stand and what to do next. So, my question is what are you doing to offset its effects, if anything? (Keep in mind that it’s certainly nothing to worry about, but it should definitely be in the back of your mind when making changes to your website, marketing, and business plans.)

I’ve had a few thoughts…

Social Media Marketing

One option webmasters have available to them is the incorporation of social media and social marketing strategies. This gives visitors and users the chance to ‘personalize’ the site a little themselves. There’s more interaction and it gives customers a feeling of being comfortable.

Now, there are strong arguments for and against SMM. Heck, I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not for all businesses, but the big question is: Can it help counteract the effects of personalization? If you are able to make a connection with that customer, it’s possible to some degree.

(Matt Hamm)

Conversion Optimization

By analyzing your website, its visitors, and how users interact with it, it’s possible to customize a number of different paths in order to improve the user’s experience and boost conversion. This could include adding, removing, or tweaking graphics. It could be testing headlines, improving or changing copy, or altering keywords and navigation to make a site visitor realize that this is the site they’ve been looking for since the creation of the Internet.

Will this help sites compete with the constant inclusion of personalization? Maybe. To some degree anyway. If nothing else, it will help site owners make the most from each person who visits their site.

Untouchable Personalization Factors?

The methods included above can help to influence the possible behavioral factors included in personalization, but unfortunately, they do nothing for the geographic, technical, historical, or chronological factors (or others I may not have thought about).

I personally feel the best way to handle these types of factors is to simply ensure your site is as user friendly as possible.

To help combat technical factors, make sure your site works. For example, if your site doesn’t work with IE6, you might not do well in the search results for that browser’s users.

Geography might be kind of permanent, but this isn’t totally out of touch for webmasters. At least, it’s nothing some local SEO couldn’t help with. Of course, if you live in Las Vegas and want to show up in New York results, you’ll have to do a bit of work. It’s just not possible to show up in everyone’s local results, particularly not with geo-tagging becoming more prominent.

(Slightlynorth)

Other than that, webmasters need to give their sites a little TLC. Keeping a constant supply of new, quality content will help battle chronological factors and keep people coming back while helping to target a specific user.

So, my question is: What are you doing to combat personalization and improve conversion? Do you agree with my suggestions here?

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6 comments to “ How To Fight Personalization — Is It Possible? ”

1. # 1 Raddie has said:
   January 22nd, 2010 at 6:27 pm

   I like to think I know most of the terms marketers use but I would like to know what you mean by persoanlization? Certainly, when it comes to more localized searches I would think that that can only be good for the average Joe to let him get a slice of the pie, and give us some chance to compete against the big sites with big corporation budgets.

2. # 2 Roger has said:
   January 23rd, 2010 at 11:08 am

   I’m more worried about how I and my clients can measure independently the performance od our sites on Google if we can’t remove the distortion due to personalisation. Maybe use a proxy server, but that could be skewed too.

3. # 3 wiwii has said:
   January 24th, 2010 at 7:28 pm

   Hi Raddie,
   I am tired of hearing Google’s search result changes.. They give webmasters headache, why?
   Because of their routinely changing SEO ranking, and the result in SERP’s…
   In my understanding, personalization when you search something yesterday, generic [shoes], than other websites like nike or addidas, the generic [shoes] link will automatically ranked higher than other website higher to him, for you only, because Google understand that you like that website and they want you to go their every time you search a shoes..
   Its suck’s for me..I am practicing SEO right now but, but it’s so difficult coz their are so many changes…
   : )

4. # 4 Angie has said:
   January 25th, 2010 at 8:12 am

   Personalization involves a number of factors that essentially creates a set of results based on ‘you’.

   If you check the first link in the article, you’ll get a basic idea. There’s also a more in depth look at it here: http://huomah.com/Search-Engines/Search-Engine-Optimization/The-SEO-guide-to-Google-personalized-search.html

5. # 5 what_causes_stress has said:
   February 25th, 2010 at 8:07 pm

   Personalisation=>The user experience. I am sure many many man-hours have been spent at Google analysing what they think makes the best user experience and to a certain extent we are at Googles mercy since they have the biggest share of the search market, however we can choose not to use them both for our searches as consumers and for our marketing as suppliers. We are not victims unless we choose to become victims.

6. # 6 Angie has said:
   February 26th, 2010 at 6:28 pm

   That is all very true. However, so long as they hold the majority of the market share, my clients rely on the traffic from it to sustain their income. As a marketer, we have to learn to work with it whether we like it or not.

   Angie