Scary New 2009 SEO Reality Show: Personalized Search Results

The SEO community is preparing for the brave new world google is unleashing on us with personalized search which should hit the big time in 2009. We have to move our clients away from a focus on rankings to a focus on relevant traffic resulting in conversions. It is the new SEO Reality Show that we all will be participating in.

Matt Cutts of Google recently said this "The challenge is not to pay so much attention to ranking, pay attention to traffic, pay attention to conversions and keep building good content and don't worry about 'can I show people that I rank number one for my trophy phrase.'"

Good SEO’s have been trying for years to move themselves and their clients away from a focus on rankings. It’s hard to do, for us and our clients. Rankings are an easily understood metric. Traffic is also an easy to understand metric on the surface. If you start a new SEO campaign and you start seeing a jump in traffic that can’t be attributed to something else than you assume the SEO campaign is working. Unfortunately, that’s only half of the equation. The most important metric is always conversions. What percentage of this traffic is converting? Of course, traffic is like sales, a game of numbers.

Conversions are easy to track for ecommerce websites. Service businesses have a much harder time tracking conversions from their website. Larger companies have call center staff documenting the source of every call. Did it come from a magazine the yellow pages or the website? Alternatively, different phone numbers can be used on the web site or each landing page and then analyzed to determine where the calls were generated from. Still this isn’t considered a conversion from a ROI standpoint. Sure it is great that the call to action on the web site resulted in a phone call. But did the phone call convert into a sale?

SEO’s will be forced to spend a lot more time reviewing web analytics to provide meaningful metrics to clients on a monthly basis. Most of us already do this but it will be hard to do for clients with small budgets. More of the budget will have to go towards reporting which will take needed dollars away from other SEO activities. Of course, reports can be setup to run automatically from Google Analytics but it is the analysis of this information which requires our expertise and time.

So, just to recap, personalized search is a huge change that every SEO and online marketer needs to understand. To understand how your website is doing you will need to review your traffic, activity, conversions and ROI because rankings are not going to tell you this. There have been a lot of Google Dances over the years. This dance changes everything.

Lynn Jebbia is a Senior Project Manager at ArteWorks SEO, search engine marketing company. Her focus is SEO Strategy, Keyword Analysis, Competitive Analysis, Web Site Audits, Pay Per Click Management and Client Account Management.