5 replies to this topic

[logos1234]

Hello Everyone,


I've been reading up on personalisation, particularly Google serving results based on past individual searching behaviour, even if you are not logged into your Google account. If Google and the other engines serve results in this way, what is the future for SEO? What should I be learning about to remain competitive in SEO/ Onlne Marketing if this happens? If we are all presented with varying SERPS, then if rankings can't measure SEO success, what can?

Many thanks

[Yoshimi]

Rankings haven't been a good measure of success for quite some time, after all there is no point in ranking for some obscure term if no one is looking for it. You should instead be looking at traffic and the conversion rates for that traffic, a good seo campaign will result in a marked improvement in search engine refferals, which in turn you can analyse to create better conversion rates, focussing on the terms that drive the best ROI.

Personalisation will only help this, as you will have to become more aware of who people search and what they are looking for, in a personalised world sites that don't drive customer satisfaction simply won't survive, so SEO is going to become more about the full customer journey, rather then just the first segment of that journey.

At the end of the day though search is constantly evolving, the good SEO's who want their clients to be genuinely successful seem to have no problem evolving at the same pace the search engines do, teh ones that get left behind are those who are aiming for quick fixes and who are only interested in superficial success.

[Robot Overlord]

wow that was a good answer

[Randy]

Personalization is something we've been discussing around here for a few years now. There are more if you do a forum search for personalization and related topics.

[logos1234]

Thanks everyone,

Thanks Yoshimi, that is good to know. How would you go about measuring ROI for SEO?

I'll look at those other threads too. It seems I am only about 8 years out of date At last I am catching up!

Thanks again

[Yoshimi]

generally through using analytics data, seeing where referrals are coming from and what impact they are having, most analytics packages will allow you to seperate paid and organic search traffic, you can then look at the goal conversion of all organic search traffic, and assess the trends. Of course you also need to have a firm idea of the CPA allowable for the campaign

an example;

Joe bloggs sells cars, he makes 1000 profit per car, and can spend up to 500 per aquisition.

You look at his statistics at the start of his campaign and he is getting 10 sales a month through search chanels without investment. He is spending 5000 per month with you to get his site optimised. you need to get a minimum of 10 additional sales per month for it to be worth his money keeping you employed, andyou need to show that those sales have come because of your efforts (you need to be able to prove that it is not due to that uplift in the market, or because he hired that new salesman, if you are going to keep the job) if you can get him 50 additional sales per month, then he is only spending 100 cpa, and you are flying.

However the above only works if the sales are completing online. What you may need to do is look at what an online conversion is for that client, as it won't always be a sale. It could be the sending of an enquiry, or signing up for a newsletter, or even pulling up a location map signalling an intention to visit premises. you also need to work out how much that action is worth to the client.