Personalised search as an ally to search engine marketing

The point of search engine marketing is to get groups of people, targeted through the keywords that they used, to visit a website and take a look at the products offered at the website. These visitors to the website most likely have concerns that need to be addressed and they hope to find the answers they need in that website. With a bit of work at how the products and the information are presented, then the traffic to the website can be converted to actual sales. Converting traffic to actual sales is the only proof of whether or not a search engine marketing campaign is working.

Targeting the right kind of traffic that will convert into actual buying activity is always the challenge in search engine marketing. It is no longer just the keywords anymore that are needed in snapping up traffic. Such a strategy is only effective up to a certain level. After all, it does not do a website a lot of use if there is indeed a large volume of traffic being driven to the website but no one is buying the product.

This is why personalised searches are becoming more and more valuable both for search engine marketing practitioners and search engines themselves. If the search engine can determine which kinds of search results would make its particular user happy, then it would be possible for the search engine to predict the search results that would be better suited to the user’s needs the next time he or she conducts a search using the same keywords.

On the part of the search engine marketing practitioners, personalised searches would work marvellously. This is because personalised searches give search engine marketing practitioners a better chance of converting traffic into actual sales. The system of personalised searches is like having a clearer view of the target that they are aiming at.

But how does personalised search work? Generally, there are two things that search engines look at whenever someone uses them to do searches. One of these things is the location of the user. This location is revealed by the IP address of the computer that the searcher is using. In search engine marketing, this is called geographic targeting, and search engine marketing practitioners cast their nets within the radius of a certain location to try to bring them to their website.

The other thing that search engines look at is the demographic information that the searchers themselves volunteer. The demographic information can be explicit, found within the profiles that the searchers fill in whenever they sign up for other services that the search engine offers. For Google, there is Gmail, Google Groups, Google Calendar, etc. For Yahoo, there is Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Games, etc. The demographic information can also be implicit, in which the search engine analyses its users’ search behaviour and uses what it gleaned to customise further search results.

The way personalised searches work may sound a little creepy to the layman, but the information that makes these personalised searches work are very important in search engine marketing. The information helps search engine marketing practitioners take a better aim at the traffic they are targeting.

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Personalised search as an ally to search engine marketing

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