Don’t Panic! A Hitchhiker’s Guide To Surviving SEO Changes
Personalization and SEO
by Gianluca Fiorelli (@gfiorelli1)

Disclaimer:
this speech is based over one firm statement
SEO in not a tactic.
SEO is a strategy that uses tactics for
obtaining a purpose:
qualified organic traffic.

Why are you asking me for rankings when they
all see different search result pages?

Maybe because you “forget” Personalization
Taken from What do the public understand about Search

Personalization is pervasive

And the conversion is not a funnel is a spiral

Powerful is the Force
of Personalization

Search History
It is working also if you are not logged in

Language
The language you set Google up with and the
language of the content you usually consume

Social Connections (well… Google+)
Be sure to view this Whiteboard Friday by Rand Fishkin

Localization
Because Google knows where you are, always.

Consider competitive research with
personalization in mind
67% of the time your rankings won’t
appear in the localized SERPs of
other cities
(data from Linkdex)

Use geo-ranking tools

What can I do?
Work for obtaining bigger and
stronger relevance in the local
markets that matters the most to
your business

How?
Creating events and synergies
between Online and Offline visibility
Targeting local sites
Targeting local influencers

Use Social Media data for boosting your SEO

Psst… you can use the follower base of
your competitors

The tool I used is Followerwonk of Moz

The tool I used is Followerwonk of Moz

And it is great for journalists outreach

Other Factors
Browser Used
Device Used
Timing of Search
And all these factors act at the same time

Food for Thoughts
40% of Internet Time Now On Mobile
Devices
(data from Comscore – 2/13)
40% of Mobile Users
use their devices at
home watching TV
(data from Nielsen– 2012)

Forget about (not provided) keywords
Think about queries
QUERY
=
Explicit Query
+
Implicit Query

“Stazioni del metro di Milano”
Explicit Query
Android 4.3 on the street in Milan
Implicit Query
From Keywords to Contexts: the New Query Model

Hey, that sound a lot like Hummingbird

Search Entities
• A query a searcher submits;
• Documents responsive to a query;
• The Search Session during which the searcher submits
the query;
• The time at which the query is submitted;
• Advertisements presented in response to the query;
• Anchor text in a link in a document;
• The domain associated with a document
More in this post by Bill Slawski

Search Entities
Relationships between Search Entities
Probability Score
Re-Ranking of the SERPs
More in this post by Bill Slawski

Pay Attention to This
A relationship between a first entity that has insufficient support
(e.g., not enough search history data) to associate a given
property with the first entity and a second entity that does have
sufficient support to associate the given property with the second
entity can be identified, and the given property can be associated
with the first entity with higher confidence
More in this post by Bill Slawski

In plain English that means

If my web document is not in the search
history of people searching for a query
potentially related to it

Then what I must do is being linked and/
mentioned from another web document
that indeed is present in the personalized
SERPs of those users

Because doing so Google will assign a
Probability Score that may let me pop up in
their Personalized SERPs

TL;DR
Branding
Really targeted outreach
Learn about Really Targeted Outreach for Richard Baxter

Totally Implicit Queries
Making of Google a tool, which would give you answers
to things that matters to you, even when you don’t ask
(Larry Page)

Totally Implicit Queries
Watch this interview to Baris Gultekin shot at I/O 2013

HEY!
This is not SEOable!

Oh… it is!

Email Marketing to the rescue
https://developers.google.com/gmail/actions/overview

Final Thoughts
SEO in a silo is not enough for
“conquering” faithful customers

Final Thoughts
SEO must synergically interact with
all the other Internet Marketing
disciplines

Final Thoughts
And the same is valid for Social
Media, Content and Email Marketing

Final Thoughts
Because the sum of them is not 4,
but 5

Final Thoughts
SEO must become
Search Experience Optimization

Don’t Panic! A Hitchhiker’s Guide To Surviving SEO Changes
Personalization and SEO
by Gianluca Fiorelli (@gfiorelli1)