Universal Personalization: Now There's a Rollout Name

Google made a stealth announcement on December 7: the rollout of personalized search results. Google will now track individual search behavior for 180 days via cookies (previously held for 30 minutes) and feed historical site clicks into all new searches, regardless of whether you are logged into a Google account.

The implication is that Google search results will be increasingly different on individual browsers. To respond to this change, we’ll plan to evolve our SEO success measures to look at traffic and conversion in addition to cookie-free search rank results. I’m in the process of updating relevant guidelines.

A history-free rank order can still be tracked, but you might have less data on its percentage of total. New queries become more important because follow-on Google responses are built from previous click choices. Being #1 won’t mean as much; traffic & conversion become more relevant measures than rank. For known brands, I would expect to see more qualified SEO traffic over time. Less preferred players will probably spend more on paid search, which has fewer personalization rules.

More details:

· Google universal personalized search announcement (Google)

· A more in-depth review & detailed instructions on opt-out (Search Engine Land)

What To Do, Kathmandu

Since most of this month entails airplanes and Asia, I only have two things to say. One, I love that I can use search to find user ratings & locations of vegetarian restaurants in places like Hong Kong, Madrid, and Buenos Aires. Or maybe I just love combining search, travel and food in the best way possible.

Here’s the view from the road to town, next to the guesthouse where I stayed Nepal:

I’m still waiting for the images of the best Engrish-language menu ever (includes groupings like Chow Mein: What About It?).

Why Search Is More Important Than Social (For Now)

I sometimes forget to include basics about search in a lot of my documentation. I have to remember to add it back in later. I figure after years of babbling about the difference it makes, and showing people the traffic increases, I might not have to go back to the basic business case. But this is foolish, because whenever I have to explain the anatomy of a search page and clarify paid vs. organic search, I’d better back it up with the reason the listener should even care.

For any company, you should care because more than 15 billion searches are performed every month – just in the US. You should care because 80% of web visitors start with a search engine in their browser. You should care because Google is always the top web site globally.

For Autodesk, the reasons are the significant percentage of global traffic that arrives through search. Tons of users looking for tasks, not just brand – the long tail for SEO counts for millions of keywords and millions of visitors. As much as I love social, these types of numbers make a difference:

Social Media: It's Here, Get Used To It

Social media is here to stay. Because we’ve gotten too used to self-narrating and because there’s too many choices and too much marketing to possibly navigate without tons of peer input.

Okay, maybe that’s not the reason. But if we’re stuck in line or don’t know what to say to our boyfriend’s aunt’s neighbor, we can at least read a movie review from a trusted high school friend.

And journalists have a chance of writing again, providing they can do it in 140 characters and include keywords.

Basically, brands (personalities, small business and enterprise) have a new audience in a new channel where people haven’t become immune to marketing.

Proof:

Stockholm Syndrome: Chained in a Cube

Sometimes, the questions you ask at the start of a new job are the most important. You ask why things are done one way vs. another. You question silly processes, bad rules, missing pieces, and opinion-based decisions. You also see the light bulb of new ways to work, meet more people who are smarter than you, and try a standard task with a better approach.

Regardless of whether there’s more good or bad, we all get used to a new environment quickly. We forget anything that shocked or amazed us. The only tragedy is when Stockholm syndrome sets in, and you no longer fight the silliness. You go along with it. You accept one bad choice after another.

I found one action that helps counteract this. When someone joins the company, take them out for lunch or coffee or a drink. Ask them what they’ve noticed. Encourage them to share what they see that you might never have thought of. You’re welcoming them, and they’re helping you get out of jail free.

Death of the Fluffy Slogan

To me, this is the main difference between traditional marketing and new marketing (new marketing being anything after the Age of InterWeb). Traditional marketing is usually described as top down, protected message sent and spent outwards, proprietary, lockstep through controlled channels, web being just one of the cul-de-sacs in the distribution.

New media, as per usual, is web and the latest definition of social media. It's testable, data-driven (with as many ways to interpret data as you'd like), evolved around the customer... and often isolated as a subsection of marketing, not something that every marketer should know.

You can see the difference most clearly in the death of the fluffy slogan. With so many brands and so much advertising, it's hard for a product to enter a market with a description that has nothing to do with what it does. If you wanted to compete with thousands of chocolatiers tomorrow, would you really start out with "melts in your mouth, not in your hands'? Or Clairol's 1950s slogan of 'Does she... or doesn't she?"

These were great slogans of known brands, but the requisite for a combination of innovation and instant relevance for the ADD, search-addled masses means that it probably won't work anymore. We need more breakfasts of champions to tie a slogan to a context, when the entire day is a full-time musical of ad jingles.

Influence vs. Implement

When I first contacted a few vendors for some global SEO work, one of them would not have the conversation until I explained whether or not they would be able to directly implement all the changes they wanted. At first I thought it was odd -- they'd get paid either way -- but as I adjusted to my new company culture, I realized that an SEO program that seems suggestive only is quite the uphill trek.

We're still able to get a lot of the changes through because our SEO and editorial teams are combined, which I think gives us a huge advantage. But even in editorial, the idea is that realization of best practices is a natural byproduct of education. What if the goals are different? What if a stakeholder truly loves their messaging down to the choice of dangling modifier? What if a traditional marketer wants their SEO results, but doesn't really want any of the content changes required to achieve those results.

On the flip side, I've seen vendors implement their content changes in horrific ways that, in my mind, are far worse than marketing fluff. You've seen it. It reads just like a Google Translation of English to Robot. At the end of the day, I prefer working with a subject matter expert who will accept the logic and goals my rewrite, but will absolutely slap my edits down around when terminology truly doesn't fit.

Design, SEO, the Creative Underclass, and a Resonant Middle Path

Aside from the natural flow of these three topics, it's interesting to see the parallels between resonant word choice and resonant design choice. As far as Google is concerned, both choices are only measurable by A/B tests to see what the masses think of a simple parallel choice. But where does innovation fit into that scenario? If the only known current choice is only between a slow horse and a fast horse, how do you get a majority to accept the feasibility of an airplane? How would testing really capture fundamental differentness, where traffic might not speak towards all possibilities of improved comprehension, efficiency, and function but rather identify the most well-tread path?

People tend to self-divide into visual and text preferences, and what that could mean is that there's a natural middle ground between Flash and words. The design elements can be used to help funnel visual learners into their natural playground, while those of us who are drawn to text can happily go play in our natural environs. Like blogs.

Comcast, Belkin, and The Familiar Customer Support Ring of Hell

Comcast and Belkin have not so surprisingly joined forces to create the perfect customer support torture device. Comcast sent me to Belkin this morning with no idea what was happening, and here's the options for Belkin's customer support on the weekends:

1. Press 7 to replace your hardware.
2. Press 9 for a non-networking product like UBS, iPod, and so on.
3. Press 1 for technical support.

All options return this recording: "You have not entered a valid option."

And the recording starts over. The evil infinite loop is alive and well! Mwahahahaha!

What's in a Name? Hopefully Not Any Customer Confusion

Interesting discussion today around what customers are looking for. Do they want a one-stop shop for software learning? Is that different than interest in the product? Are product, industry, or profession more important? Does customer interest set change drastically from before and after they buy a product? And where does a product feature description fall in that spectrum?

Once you have all of that information, you have the start of a content plan. That plan should be reflected in the name and core messaging. And be careful of the search confusion that can start around the name of a product or campaign - are there too many like brands out there? And do you own the related URLs?

Is Web Video for Everyone?

The other day I presented as part of the panel for the Web Video Leadership Forum at San Francisco State University. It was curious to see that video is now an integral part of marketing, but everyone seemed to be struggling with how to handle the costs. As prices lower and more quick cam tools become available, this will be less of an issue. And there will be more user generated content.

It seems most webizens take one or the other path -- video watchers or text readers -- though the preference can change depending on content type and context. Are there that many people who chase both, even when they're scanning quickly through a site?

Choosing the Right Words = SEO Triumph

Wow -- last month, I suggested a one-word change on the homepage for a nonprofit that I work with. It was already part of a paid search ad set. Now it drives more traffic to the site than the URL, and is second most popular keyword in terms of referring traffic the site.

More proof that it's all about content, even if you don't have tons of text on your page.

The nonprofit is Lotus Outreach, they work with women and children at risk for human trafficking in India and Cambodia.

Global Search on an Enterprise Scale

Working on some global SEO projects at Autodesk -- worked out really well for Japan, still waiting for all the pieces to fall together for France. Important things: never underestimate the need for bilingual relationships. Top level domains, language itself, and geotargeting tools (if it's Google) are what search engines use to identify location, and I suspect that the language metatag and the W3 language information list will also come into play. If you have a centralized keyword list and assignments to agreed landing pages, then you can more easily research keyword data and identify the right local synonym.

• Search Engine Watch on the Global Website Presentation at SES New York
• Interview with Motoko Hunt about Global SEO

Interview at Search Engine Strategies Chicago