I’ve been reading a number of interesting articles about the imminent death of search engine optimization. Frankly, traditional SEO has been languishing on its death bed for the last several years. While this doesn’t bode well for the folks who have built careers out search optimization, we’re going to see a lot of new opportunities for smart marketers able to marry traditional research with search engine savvy.
I’ll explain.
Google has been moving towards more personalized search services for the last couple of years. Much of this is driven by new principles of the semantic web and the advent of web services and media types that compete with traditional web content for relevancy. Who’s to say, for example, that someone searching for Angelina Jolie will be interested in viewing news more so than her videos or photos?
Google’s New Personalization Tools
Google no longer wants to prioritize content for you—they want their users to do it themselves. This approach is now clearly apparent with the promote and remove functionality now showing up on a lot of search results.
Expect to see more of this technology in the coming months. I strongly believe that search personalization will only become more pronounced in future—both user-managed personalization and machine-generated based on your “personalization profile”: personalization based on both your prior activity and the behaviors of users similar to you.
So what does personalized search mean for the traditional SEO? If you deconstruct the process of SEO it breaks down into three parts:
- The ability to forecast and predict how search engines will assign relevancy
- The understanding of the terminology used by target users (and their search heuristics)
- Modification of web pages and content to optimize for the top two parts
The combination of these elements fundamentally drives search optimization. With personalized search, however, #1 and #3 lose their importance, while #2 because vital. The future of SEO hinges on user research.
User research and profiling has gained importance in user experience design, interactive strategy, and digital marketing. SEOs will also need to become user researchers if they hope to excel. Not only will they need to gain insights into how people search, they need to be able to understand who their users are, how they behave, and what their needs are. This goes way beyond traditional keyword and terminology research—SEOs will need to “get inside the heads” of their users—gaining understanding into demographics, psychographics, and technographics.
The future of SEO may hinge on the ability of marketers to truly understand the makeup of their target customers. This may kill off a good number of the traditional number-crunching SEOs, but the savvy and innovative players will find lucrative opportunities to optimize for the next generation of search experiences.
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