Real Estate SEO and Technology Blog

“Personal Search” is Dramatically Altering SEO for Google

As it did over 300 times last year, Google is planning to unveil an updated algorithm. Except this one is going to change things dramatically. It will place much more emphasis on the user’s experience within their website. How are they going to do this? In a word, analytics. Many of you probably have a “tracking program” or an “analytics” program like Google Analytics or even VisiStat. These programs tell you a great deal about those who are visiting your website. By tracking bounce rates, Google can make certain assumptions about your searches. They can follow visitors experience with cookies to see how long users remain on the website compared to sites similar in nature.

But that’s not all. Google will try to find out what type of content you provide your website visitors. Searching will be changing more so now than ever before. You need to innovate, improve bounce rates, implement video content and most of all, improve your website experience for visitors. The best way to do this is to spark more interest and be more creative to excite your viewers. Here at WebsTarget, we are updating now, so as to keep you up to date.

What is a Behavior Based Search?

With the new Google algorithm, everybody who does a search will end up with different search results based on their prior search history. Personalization is going to be “web-wide” using third party cookies and other factors.

For example you may search for “Delta”. Some are looking for the airline company, some are looking for the faucet company, and some are looking for river locations. The idea is, personal search will know that and provide results accordingly.

Intent-based Search

Google has been looking up your IP and revising results based on IP. They know where you’re located and can make assumptions about the intent of your search. As you get more into intent-based search, it’s going to change the way pages rank. “The page that ranks for a faucet company query is an entirely different type of search than the page that ranks for an airline company query.”

Where Does this Leave the SEO Crowd?

You might as well consider that Page Ranking is dead. In the future you’re going to have to look at your analytics program, measure traffic, bounce rates, action and much more.

In the first six months of 2009, we’re going to see a lot more implementation of behavior and intent-based search leading to a mindset of “ranking is dead, and traffic will be all that matters.”

Universal Search

This will be the most significant factor of 2009. Google looks at soundtracks and convert them to text. They can jump into the middle of videos, scan sites to determine if you have video/images or not. There are a lot of variables in universal search, and some of these variables tell how engaging your site is.

What will be scary to those casual users, is if you don’t have video and your competition does, you’re going to see a big shift in rankings. If the top ten sites don’t have video, they may lose their ranking over night.

There is no question about it. Getting placed at the top of the search engines will change from what we have known in the past. Here at WebsTarget, we are keeping all of our clients at the top of the search engines by learning this type of information early on and making the applicable changes before the competition.

The real question is: what are you doing to stay ahead of the competition?

Randy Eagar, CRS
President WebsTarget, SEO
www.WebsTarget.com