Personalization is playing a bigger role in Search and Google especially. Let's understand what are the personalized SERPs, what factors are at the base of personalization and how we can take advantage from that as SEOs.

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

2. 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.

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

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

5. Personalization is pervasive

6. And the conversion is not a funnel is a spiral

7. Powerful is the Force
of Personalization

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

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

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

11. Localization
Because Google knows where you are, always.

12. 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)

13. Use geo-ranking tools

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

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

16. Use Social Media data for boosting your SEO

17. Psst… you can use the follower base of
your competitors

18. The tool I used is Followerwonk of Moz

19. The tool I used is Followerwonk of Moz

20. And it is great for journalists outreach

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

22. 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)

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

24. “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

25. Hey, that sound a lot like Hummingbird

26. 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

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

28. 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

29. In plain English that means

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

31. 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

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

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

34. 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)

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

36. HEY!
This is not SEOable!

37. Oh… it is!

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

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

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

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

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

43. Final Thoughts
SEO must become
Search Experience Optimization

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