Personalized Search - SMX Toronto 2010 - Rob Garner - iCrossing
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Transcript of Personalized Search - SMX Toronto 2010 - Rob Garner - iCrossing
SMX Toronto
April 2010Rob GarnerStrategy Director
iCrossing
The Basics, Google Ethos,
and Optimization
Personalization:
COPYRIGHT ICROSSING / PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL 2
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
214.676.2089
@robgarner
www.facebook.com/garner
GreatFinds.iCrossing.com
Linkedin.com/in/robgarner
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