Understanding
The Day When Rankings Soar But
Your Sales Die
with Video by Michael Marshall
By John Alexander
Watch the following videos from Search Engine Academy trainer
Michael Marshall.
This time around, we examine a few of the challenges
that SEOs will face in the future with the growing
popularity of personalization of search. Personalization is
the option that people can toggle on to improve their search
results based on their personal interests. With
personalization turned on, the search engine can gather
information about the history of your searches and as the
time you use it increases,
it can actually become accustomed to your searching habits
so as to present information that is more important or more
interesting to you
personally, than someone else.
So where does the challenge come in with SEO you ask?
The challenge is that as the popularity of personalization
grows so will there likely be a diminishing effect on your
ranking reports. In simple, it means that 4 people in the
same household could all be taking turns using the very same
computer and doing searches for the very same keyword
phrase, and yet each person would typically see completely
different results because of their personal use of the
Internet and a growing history of different interests.
What this
means is that you no longer can tell exactly what
your ranking reports mean because where you rank for
one person will not be the same as where you rank
for the next person or the next. Thus ranking
reports could very well become meaningless in time.
It should be understood that with personalization
turned on, the search engine is not using a
different algorithm. Instead, the algorithm is the
same, but there is a shuffling of results based on
the particular individuals history of usage. The
search engines attempt to serve up even more
relevant content to that individual based on their
personal interests.
So many millions of users - each with different
personal interests and differing Web histories.
Personalization of Search is one of the biggest
changes coming
This in turn means that it
could become very difficult to determine where your ideal buying
audience is finding you because you will no longer be able
to simply do a search and see who is ranking number 1.
Obviously if you are interested in your own products and you
own industry, you site may come up in the top results when
you search. But what is the rest of the world seeing? With
personalization growing in popularity, there is no way you
can use the traditional methods to know.
Personalization of Search may bring a new dimension of
satisfaction by providing the user with much more
personalized results. After all, everyone wants the best
search results. However, it is bound to pose a few
challenges for those who have never thought out what is
really happening and the far reaching impact that it will have
with posing certain challenges with respect to traditional
search engine marketing. As I mentioned in part 1, there are
solutions. But we feel that it's important to help SEO
students grasp the implications of how much things could
possibly be affected.
So what are others saying
about how big this change will be? Listen carefully as
Michael teaches more:
Michael Marshall is a respected SEO associate educator and
advanced mathematician who has taught together with Robin Nobles and
I over the last several years. Michael is a technical expert
who often teaches at our Ultra Advanced Symposiums as well
as in his own Search
Engine Academy in North Carolina.
Each Search Engine Academy has been trained in all the
latest details and you can attend any class in a local
community across 4 countries.
Here is a recent quote from an article that Michael
published he states that:
"Without a reliable
means of rank checking, traditional SEO loses its
foundations for optimization decisions. They can’t tell
who the leaders are. They’ve lost sight of the
bellwethers. A bellwether is any entity in a given arena
that serves to create or influence trends or to presage
future happenings. Without a bellwether, for example, sheep
might be left to wander aimlessly.
Without
a reliable means of rank checking, traditional SEO also
loses its metrics for determining its success or failure
regarding changes made for the sake of optimization.
Traditional SEO is a process the methodology of which
is predominantly trial and error."
In his article, Michael Marshall does far more justice to
the topic than I can, on a technical level but also see full
quotes he has from an IBM
Distinguished Engineer Mike Moran and how big he estimates
Personalization will affect the future.
Personalization as it
grows in popularity will present
a MAZE of challenges - but solutions are at hand.
The
solution to the challenges of the effect of
personalization is being able to grasp the
big picture. Gone are the days of counting
characters in a Title tag or Description
tag. Trying to measure SEO influences
separately one at a time will be obsolete.
Advanced competitive intelligence is not
just a new "buzz" word.
The type of solutions to these challenges
will actually have a variety of excellent
benefits other than just gaining genuine
visibility.
Try and imagine being able to do search
marketing and optimization in only the
minimum of moves, making only the minimum of
changes for your exact search landscape and
making maximum impact.
Will these
techniques really be possible in the future you ask? No,
actually they are available right now so you can begin to
stabilize your results and prepare for the changes. No one
can say for sure the rate at which personalization will make
it's impact. The sad thing for some who are unawares is that
with only slow and subtle changes over a given period, they
may never even realize what is happening other than their
traffic is dead and sales have stopped.
So we start by making our students and readers aware. Then
you can choose to take action and prepare now before changes
become too noticeable. With the study of Advanced
Competitive Intelligence Made Easy, you can:
Understand the Theory and
gain the Insights You need To know
Understand why and how
search engines grade on a curve
Discover how to
distinguish your specific industry search landscape
Gain
knowledge to expedite your visibility for highly
competitive phrases
Accurately
gauge what needs to be applied to your Web site in
minimal time
Understanding
the exact influences that SEO factors have on each
other
Utilize
powerful equations to determine exactly what needs to be
done without
relying on expensive software solutions.
Michael Marshall has his complete suite of tools on the
new server and they are now available for those who have been waiting for access to the suite of tools, they can be
found right here: http://bit.ly/g4Ksxd
Grab all 3 tools for just $97/mo with
this Coupon code: smart-ai
With the following coupon code you can grab all 3 tools
including:
-- SEO Recon 3D ( a tool for measuring your exact competitive landscape for any key phrase)
-- SEM S.C.O.U.T. (Which shows exactly which missing words your copy can benefit from to match a theme based on AI)
-- SEO Sniper (A keyword research tool that works with Google data)
Other Dates and Teaching Locations:
Advanced Competitive Intelligence is just one of the latest
SEO Workshop topics
being taught at each of our Local
Search Engine Academy locations here
About John Alexander John Alexander is Co-director of Training at Search
Engine Workshops offering live, SEO Workshops with his
partner SEO educator Robin Nobles, author of the very first
comprehensive online search engine marketing courses. John is author of an
e-book called Wordtracker
Magic and has
taught SEO skills to people from 87 different countries world
wide. John is also Director of Search
Engine Academy with localized Search Engine Academy
training centers where the Complete SEO Mastery Workshop and 6
Month Mentoring program is taught locally to business
owners and individuals in
communities across North Americaand
Internationally in Asia.
