Proudly providing web design to charities, NGOs, social enterprises and other not for profit organisations since 1997.
Is Google search personalisation helpful?
We all love Google—we have even made it a verb—but why do they have to meddle all the time? A little like Facebook, they seem to be making decisions for me. They are making assumptions on what I want to see, thinking that they know me better than I know myself. Like most people, I don’t like it when people assume to know me. I am an individual and I want to be treated as such.
What am I talking about? Google’s personalised search results. If you haven’t noticed, Google have made some changes to the way your search results are filtered. What you see and what the audience of your website sees when they type in the same search terms can be very different. Why? Well, everyone’s search is based on several factors like location, the data centre being used and – this is the one I find annoying – your personalised search history.
Google takes into account your :
- Web history (which pages you have previously looked at)
- Personalised results (which results you have chosen to click on)
- Recent searches (what you have recently searched for)
- Universal search (what the rest of the world is searching for)
- Geographic location (where you are located)
- Social search (relevant public content from your friends and contacts)
For a communications manager, these can cause problems when trying to measure your search engine optimisation success. If you are like me, you regularly test your key search terms by typing them into Google and seeing how you fare against the competition.
You may think you are making good progress in your search engine optimisation, but actually it’s just Google remembering your searches and bringing up your website further up the search each time. Your boss is pleased when you show him/her, but is it an accurate reflection of your hard work? You actually have no way of knowing what search results your users are seeing when they type in your key search terms without asking them.
So how can you tell if your search engine optimisation is working?
There are a couple of things you can do to make sure your optimising is making an impact:
- You can turn off you search history personalisation or pause your web history. If you have a Google account, you have to do this for both your signed in history and your signed-out history. Google provides information on how to do that in the link above.
- You can take a deeper look at your Google Analytics. There is a wealth of information in your analytics account on where users are coming from and what they are searching. What’s more important than where you rank on the page, is that you are getting the traffic you want. If this is going up, it’s a good sign. If you want to learn more about how to use Google Analytics, we run a great Google Analytics training course. The next one is on 25th September at CAN Mezzanine.
- Look at your conversions. This is the real measure on your success. Are you getting people to do what you want them to do when they come to your site? Interact more, donate more, make a booking…whatever your goals may be.
Google is changing every day, and this won’t stop. But then the way people are using the web is also changing. I always say the most important way to drive more traffic to your website is to have the best website. If you need some help and advice on getting the most out of your website and beekeeper, remember you can have a review meeting with our new account manager at any time free of charge.
If you are interested in learning more about how to improve your search engine optimisation, we have a handy blog post.