SMX Toronto

April 2010Rob GarnerStrategy Director

iCrossing

The Basics, Google Ethos,

and Optimization

Personalization:

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MediaResearch &

Analytics

Website

Development

Search

OptimizationSocial Media

Mobile

Marketing

• Paid search

media

• Display and rich

media advertising

• Online to offline

integration

• Global campaign

integration

• Market research

• Campaign

analytics

• Integrated

dashboard

reporting

• Linguistic

Profiling

• Experiential

Mapping

• Site development

strategy

• User experience

development

• Creative and

technical design

and development

• Natural search

optimization

• RSS Feeds

• Content

syndication

• Social media

audit

• Reputation

management

• Word-of-mouth

campaigns

• Mobile strategy

development

• Mobile site

development and

optimization

• Mobile media

campaigns

Technology

• Merchantize™

Paid Media

• Interest2Action™

Search Analytics

• Network Sense™

Reputation Monitoring• Network Sense™

Social Media

• Sharp View™

Marketing Dashboard

Agency services

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with clients including…

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Top 25 Interactive

Top Digital Agency

Top Search Agency

Fastest Growing

Companies

Top 25 InteractiveNumber One

Search Agency

Search Agency of

the Year

Awards and Accolades

THE BASICS

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Personalization is a significant philosophical shift,

From the objective results

To the subjective results

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But the reality is that the current state of

SERP changes are somewhat subtle

• 20% displacement of organic rankings based on session activity alone (lower ranking

displacement not shown)

• This search preceded by “arkansas things to do,” “arkansas vacation,” “arkansas hot

springs rock and mineral shops”, etc.

• “We're generally not changing the entire character of the page” - Brian Horling, Google,

SMX West 2010

Turned-off Session-based, signed out

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Personalization impacts both paid, natural,

and feed submissions

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As a user, you can turn it off, but it’s not easy

• Add “&pws=0” to the end of

your URL string in the

address bar

• Signed-in searches, you

must remove all Web

History

– http://www.google.com/support/

accounts/bin/answer.py?answe

r=54067

• Signed-out searches, click

on “Disable

Customizations,” and/or

clear browser cookies

– http://www.google.com/support/

accounts/bin/answer.py?answe

r=54048

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Personalization algos can vary for multiple

users on the same machine

• Theme and interest

based

• Session data can shape

results, and help

differentiate between

multiple uses on one

machine

Happy couple who might be searching on the same computer.

Google sees them as two different people Photo CC - Flickr

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Personalization is available worldwide, in 40

languages

• Arabic

Bulgarian

Catalan

Chinese

Croatian

Czech

Danish

Dutch

English

Filipino

Finnish

French

German

• Greek

Hebrew

Hindi

Indonesian

Italian

Japanese

Korean

Latvian

Lithuanian

Norwegian

Polish

Portuguese

Romanian

• Russian

Serbian

Slovak

Slovenian

Spanish

Swedish

Ukrainian

Vietnamese

…And others

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized-search-for-everyone.html

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You can click on some searches to view

customizations

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Ranking reports are no longer fully stable

• Can be biased towards

– IP address

– Applied user history on machine

– Other personalization factors

• Objective rankings can be taken via proxy

– But it still doesn’t tell the whole story on personalized referrals

– Overall, scraper-based rank checking software should remain a directional

datapoint of performance

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But ranking reports won’t die…

• … They will just shift to analytics-based tracking

• Personalized results will pass a ranking variable in the Google

referring string “cd=1”, with 1 equal to the organic page

ranking

• Actual average position may become the norm for organic

rankings

• Full implementation would enable natural position reporting to

become more effective and accurate

– http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/04/upcoming-change-to-googlecom-

search.html

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Other fun facts

• Personalization encompasses mobile, geography/local, theme,

user behavior, and web search history

• 180 days of history are considered for non-logged-in users

• If you are logged-in to any Google service, then you are

receiving personalized results

– Adwords, Orkut, Gmail, Adsense, etc.

• Site data is a signal, measured from the URL string and also

the Google Toolbar

• Yahoo and Bing also have some personalization elements, but

are not as robust as Google

• Personalization is nothing new

– So don’t freak out

THE GOOGLE ETHOS AROUND

PERSONALIZATION

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Google’s “obligation” to use your data

• At the first SMX Advanced in Seattle, June 2007, Matt Cutts

stated that Google had an obligation to leverage the personal

data provided by its users into something useful.

Personalization is one outcome of that obligation.

• Google’s Craig Silverstein once painted a futuristic portrait of

personalization in his description of “search pets” – essentially

these are robots that know you and can complete various tasks

on command

Bottom line: Hyper-personalization is a core

goal at Google, and will continue to impact the

results – we may just be seeing the beginning

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Bryan Horling of Google, interview with The Register

• March 3, 2010, SMX West :

• Google personalizes 20% of all web searches, based generally on web history, location, and social factors.

• “As it stands today, just about every user who is engaging with Google search today is affected [by personalization].”

• "For years, we've been personalizing for an entire continent [or country],"

• "You should be creating compelling and interesting content that's focused on the user. Your website should be fast. It should be clean. It should be understandable. It should be compelling enough that users want to return to use it."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/03/google_personalized_search_explained/

OPTIMIZING FOR

PERSONALIZED RESULTS

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There are many different signals related to

personalization

• Geo

– IP address

– Google Nearby

• Time of day

• User behavior

– Session data can differentiate between users on the same machine

– Web search history

– Toolbar data

– Bookmarks

– Clicks

• Social

– Links in your Google Profile

– Links to your social network profiles (ex. Twitter)

• Technical

– Device

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Optimizing for Personalized results

• Do the basics very well– Clean tech hygiene, know your analytics, good page markup, thoroughly

tested keyword targeting

• Optimize for search with personalization turned off

• Develop both high-level themes, and long tail

themes

• Build up your social networks, and use them to

disseminate and promote relevant content

• Know your target user through market research

• Develop compelling content strategies

“On The Impact Of Personalization And Real-Time Search”

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/index.cfm?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=118830

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Knowing your target audience is now more

important than ever

• Inform your personas through interviews, and ask subjects to talk

about how they search; or, better yet, observe how they search online

• Map keyword learnings into more complex scenarios for the process

of finding

• Leverage learnings from paid search and analytics data early on

• Remember that often the real gold mine in all of market research is

finding and leveraging just one new word or linguistic cue

• Get out of the habit of making assumptions based on what you think

your target audience will search for.

• Look to social networks for linguistic cues

• Use internal searches to help inform campaigns and future designs

• Consider the various types of digital assets, and how your target

audience searches for them

“The Days of Guessing at Keyword Research Are Over”

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/index.cfm?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=121839

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Use search data and ask search questions

when developing personas

“More About Search In The Web Design Process”

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/index.cfm?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=120971

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Getting back to basics:

Internal SEO considerations that a site owner controls

• Article Syndication

• Body Content

• Canonicalization Issues

• Cloaking

• Digital Assets

• Directory Presence

• Document Accessibility

• Duplicate Content

• Frames

• Hidden Text

• Internal Linking Optimization

• Javascript & Flash Navigation

• Market Research

• Meta Descriptions

• Micro Sites and Sub-Domains

• Obtaining Links from Relevant Sites

• On-page Javascript and CSS

• Optimizing Images

• Page Titles

• Redirecting

• Requiring User Actions

• Robots.txt Files

• Secure Servers

• Server Location

• Sites Built in Flash

• Splash Pages

• URL Structure

• Using Ajax

“22 Considerations for Improving Natural Search Performance”

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=73550

“Hot SEO Trend for 2010:Getting Back To Basics”

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/index.cfm?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=123631

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It’s worth repeating

To succeed in a personalized world of search…

Do the basics very well

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THANK YOUSMX Toronto

April 2010

Rob GarnerStrategy Director

iCrossing.com

Rob.Garner@icrossing.com

214.676.2089

@robgarner

www.facebook.com/garner

GreatFinds.iCrossing.com

Linkedin.com/in/robgarner

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