The latest concept in internet marketing is focusing on each particular user – their wants, desires, likes, dislikes, habits, hobbies, etc.
As opposed to more traditional marketing methods, which were geared toward the company’s perception of what a user wanted, modern marketing turns it around and delivers what the user actually wants, as evidence by their online habits and history.
The future of user driven search engine optimisation has few boundaries. It is expected that very shortly, internet marketers will provide all email messages, CMS, blog posts, product and service offerings, and much more based on each user’s preferences.
The world of e-commerce is quickly turning from a company-centric experience to one that is completely driven by the consumer.
How User Driven Results Impact Search Engine Optimisation
Already the major search engines are making the shift to user-driven search results. Most notably, Google personalized search was introduced at the end of 2009 and it changed much about the way internet marketers perform search engine optimisation.
Customising the user experience is key in terms of optimising your site so that it appears higher in the results for individual searches. In order to reach potential clients, you will have to give them exactly what they want, and ensure that search engines can find that content to provide it in the results. Because results are based on the individual user’s past searching history, you have to delve deeper into the normal online behaviour of your target market and keep these factors in mind when developing pages.
Relevancy is of higher importance than ever before. Search engine crawlers determine relevancy to keywords based on your incoming and outgoing links, meta tags, and longer key phrases. Since search engines are becoming more intuitive, they know that a user with a cached past history looking for “widgets” doesn’t necessarily want to know about them, but wants to find out where to buy them.
Linking is perhaps more important now than it ever has been. The more links, both outbound and inbound links that you create to other sites, the easier it will be for Googlebots to index your site appropriately. Take care in selecting the sites you use for linking purposes; one with poor ranking and reputation will do more harm than good regardless of relevancy to the subject matter.
Another method to use for helping your site gain rankings in personalized searches is to exhort customers to actually search for your site rather than putting the URL directly into the browser’s bar. This creates a history at the search engine for a user and pushes your site to the top of the results for associated keywords.
Don’t forget geo targeting. Google knows where each user lives and the more you can add locality tags to your content, the better your chances of appearing in search results for users in a specific location.
User driven search engine optimisation is a key marketing concept now and will only continue to gain in importance as time goes on. Start thinking now about ways that you can target specific internet users and drive them to your online content. In a short time, this will be the one factor that makes a difference between flailing and succeeding for online business owners.
About Sean Rasmussen
Hi Sean,
I am both fascinated and a little stressed by the thought of user driven search engine optimisation. I’m fascinated because this is clearly the future of consumerism. Everything will be tailored to the individual. Now people will really be able to say that the world revolves around them.
I feel a little stressed though because if I miss the mark in terms of defining my target market then I will miss out on traffic. I’m going to have give a lot more thought to exactly who I’m targeting.
User driven search engine optimisation is great for the user, as they will hopefully get more relevant results with their searches. It is also a bit scary that Google and the other search engines know more and more about my interests and history – big brother is watching you …
From an Internet Marketer perspective it’s getting pretty hard – if you are just after the money and don’t provide genuine good content. And it is a reminder to check out how the search engines work, as they might find other things “relevant” than I do. Seems like keyword research is even more important now.
Agree with you here Renee. It seems like everyday the Big G is pushing its presence more and more into our online lives.
The down-side to User-driven search results is that the End User may not receive results that they are actually not looking for due to past history. For instance, if a user is looking for “widgets” to gain more details on them, however is provided with results on where to buy them. I guess we will have to wait and see how it all comes together.
Coles and Woolies have their reward cards. But I believe the reward cards have another side to them. They enable managers to link together customer profiles with customer purchases and therefore stock products for the specific demographic and target market. Google are moving more into this way of operation meaning that they are collecting much the same sort of information from what we search for and what we say about ourselves online. I bet there are computers out there that know more about us than we do. The question is, how can we as internet marketers extract this info from Google and make optimum use of it?
Hi Sean,
I don’t have much idea at this stage on how to target specific online users but it is interesting to read about how online marketing will be changing in the future and hopefully me reading these posts regularly that I will be ready to take advantage of the changes when they happen.
This is a very relevant post for anyone wanting to succeed in internet marketing. Just a couple of questions. When you are geo targeting would you use Australia as I am hoping to capture the world wide web with my products? and when you are advertising your site online are you better to use your www. address and not the whole http:// address? (does that make sense) so the people have to actually type your website into their search bar instead of just clicking on it? Hope you understand my questions.
Sometimes I really worry about what type of information is being collected by Google when we search and what they can access on our computers. Sometimes I wonder if Google is fantastic or scary! But……having said that I need to concentrate on what Google offers and how I can use Google to make my Internet Marketing business a success and ensure that I am getting the SERPS.