If you think about it, having a search that’s personal for the individual searching for information is more important than you might think. After all, the more personalized it is, the better it will be for the person running it.

Nowadays though, personalization is considered much lighter, with only the language you speak and the location being the main search factors. But, you can still further optimize this on your site. Here, we’ll talk about how personalization affects searches, and how you can take advantage of this with your own website.

Factors That Affect This

Let’s talk about the main factors that affect the personalization. These are usually what you need to focus on.

They are as follows:

• Your location that you’re in
• The language spoken
• Search and browsing history
• Social media
• Other similar products searched

Now, if you’re logged in to Google like most of us, the browsing history, products searched, and social media are all factors, which is why Google encourages users to “log in” for better results.

So with this, you want to ensure that you do optimize your website based on these factors. While you can’t necessarily control the last three, the first two are definitely big factors here.

Location, Location

The first place you’ll need to tackle is location. You want to be more local with your website and meta descriptions. If you’re only focusing on an international or national level, chances are you’ll get less its.

Remember, you only get one chance to truly impress people if you’re on page one, so definitely take advantage of it. If you want to be a great force in the local business searches, you will want to make sure that you put the locality that you’re doing business in, either in the title tags or meta description.

Always make sure that you have a Google My Business listing for your place, which is where Google takes the info for the business and local knowledge. If you don’t have this, chances are you won’t actually show up.

You should also make sure everything is up-to-date on the website. If you recently moved your business, always make sure to update the address, phone numbers, and even photos and locations. You want to make sure that everything is consistent, and if possible, fill out all of the fields, including a description of the business that uses a location.

Remember that most “near me” searches will happen with a mobile device, so make sure that you give as much local information as possible.

If possible, have people review your business, so that when people search for it, find it, and look into it they see reviews of happy customers, wince this will help you rank higher. You’ll want to ensure that you do this, because it makes a huge difference in whether or not you show up.

Most personalization depends on location, so you’ll want to take advantage of that as best as you can.

Language Rocks

If you do affiliate marketing, or are into international marketing, this is very important. Essentially, languages and international SEO do work well together, so you want to ensure that you’ve got language optimization being the priority, and make sure that in the case where the audience does speak other languages, you optimize for them to make it as easy as possible.

Now, to do this, it actually can be quite tedious. After all, you want to make sure that you don’t have a UX that gets compromised if done wrong. But, there are a few ways to do this, and they include:

• Have a website with multiple languages for people that speak different languages within the country
• Have a website that doesn’t target just the country, but languages
• Create similar site versions with multiple languages and such

With many of these, you’ll either have to use the .com, or the country code, depending on where you go with this. Ultimately though, it’s up to you on how you optimize for this, since language plays a huge role in the overall success of an international business.

In terms of content, you’ll need to ensure that you only change the content if you’re targeting a specific culture, of different audiences for the language.

For example, let’s say that you are running a tourism blog, and you want to target different countries. You wouldn’t optimize the content by talking about Japan and mentioning that you can see the Eiffel Tower there, right? Instead, you change that to perhaps seeing Mt. Fuji or the Tokyo Skytree to optimize for this.

Of course, if it’s a generalized language, do target popular aspects of it, and make sure it does the job.

Keywording is Key!

Keywords is actually very important, regardless of what others may say about it. However, there is an incorrect conception that keyword targeting only on the landing pages matter, but the thing is, if you want people to come to the pages, you need to make sure that you’re targeting everywhere you go. If you don’t, you won’t rank, and if you don’t do this, you’re not going to get new people.

What you do is, even in the meta description and the title tags, you should always make sure that you have keywords to optimize for this. This is such a powerful tool that people don’t even realize it.

For example, if you have an emergency evacuation service, you can use “Emergency Evacuation Plan Sydney” in order to get those people in that area interested in your service, and to target that area. It will also earn you more traffic and clicks, and can help with conversions.

Long-tail keywords are usually the way to go. The short ones usually don’t lower the searches, and long-tail keywords eliminate a lot of the competition, so if you create a more targeted search, people will find you. This will drive customers and revenue to your site, and it does create the personalized efforts you desire.

Optimizing for Devices

You should always make sure that you’re optimizing for devices when it comes to search e optimization for websites. However, with personalization, it definitely makes a huge difference, since if you don’t optimize for mobile, it’ll hurt your CTRs big time. Not meeting the expectations on mobile is a great way to essentially kill all of your SEO efforts, so you’ll want to especially optimize for mobile.

If you follow the mobile-first indexes, then usually, you won’ experience the ranking, and the cool thing about it, is that they do separate the mobile and desktop rankings. However, you should also keep in mind the speed.

If your site is slow, usually more than 3 seconds, you’re going to lose people. You only have a 2 second window of opportunity, so don’t waste it.

The three best tools to ensure that your speed is good, and it’s fully optimized, is this:

• Chrome User Experience Report: showcases chrome metrics
• Lighthouse: shows the website performance trackings
• Page Speed Insights: showcases the quality of the performance of pages and the optimization of it

Out of all of these though, you should focus on the optimization score, since this plays a huge role in the quality of searches.

Social Media Presence

This isn’t just a Facebook or Twitter page, this is actually more so in relation to Google+. It’s a valuable item for personalized traffic since you can get people over to the site through this, and you’ll appear in search engine results for people who follow or are connected to you through any Google service. If you are connected via Google+ or Gmail, you may notice in the corner on the right that they’ll show their last few posts.

This creates a brand for you, and you can even see a brand box in the corner, and it gives you more opportunities to make a stake in the online business game.

The problem with social media si that personalized searches usually from social media are the ones who have the lion’s share of listings, so you should definitely, if you haven’t already, take advantage of this and occupy that space as well.

The best way to do this is to create great content for this, and share it to Google+ and other accounts, so that if others follow you there, they’ll see the posts. That, combined with other social media places, will allow you to fully optimize everything.

Also, a cool thing to know is that google is currently working with Twitter, so there is a chance that these might be further connected later on. It does play a huge role, and it’s important to consider all of the pools you can cash out on.

The Intent of Searches

Finally, let’s talk about personal history and search intent. What have people been looking at? This personal history does influence the search results. There’s no easy way to really get into this, other than first impressions and loyalty to the brand. The best way to do this, is to give off a great experience and first impression so that they come back and seek you out. If they do give you a Like, Share, or a Tweet, that’s also a great way to create an affinity to the brand.

But, you should also make sure that you make it clear for the person looking this p what you’re trying to query. Google will use all of the resources to help a user, but also make sure that you’re putting yourself into the shoes of potential people that visit. You want to make sure that all of your questions are optimized and have long-tail keywords.

With this as well, also ensure that there is content for those that are coming that answer the questions, an also consider internal linking, since it will create clusters, which will help with ranking on queries.

Finally, utilize structured data such as business events, and creative parts of the business, in order to let search engines figure out the types of content.

This also will in turn enhance brand loyalty, and make it so that others will want to come to your website as well.

Conclusion

Personalization may seem smaller than it used to be, knowing how to target these factors plays a major role. Remember, you want to create the best experience for the user, and make sure to target all the different things a user might see. Always make sure that you’re influencing personalization so that the audience can find you. By doing this, you’ll be able to create more conversions, better rankings, and ultimately, create the best and friendliest user experience possible for anyone coming to your site to visit.