On the one hand, search engine optimization is a vast spectrum of tactics and solutions modern-day businesses need to use to stay visible. SEO helps your company gain that top spot for specific, industry-relevant keywords in your customers’ search queries and for particular products or services that you offer, provided that you keep the essential SEO rules in mind.
On the other hand, personalization is precisely what the term suggests: a process of creating a unique experience for that one customer who discovers your company through your website or other online outlets. The experience is relevant only to that person, making personalization far narrower in reach instead of your traditional SEO tactics.
When you keep the core principles of successful SEO in mind, you can incorporate personalization into your SEO strategy. With the right balance, you can have both concepts work hand in hand to increase your digital marketing. Here’s how you can expect personalization to affect your SEO and how you can use it to build up your online presence.
Leverage Your Location
A significant part of personalizing any customer’s experience is to use their location. Luckily for your business and your customers, people use their smartphone’s location feature to automatically narrow down their search results. This means that your business can incorporate location-based personalization into your content creation, keyword selection, and overall page design.
To ensure the success of this marketing strategy, your NAP details, also known as your name, address, and phone number, must be consistent. You should always use locally preferred terminology in the form of long-tail keywords to create content that your business should rank for. This is particularly vital for businesses with several locations, even if they are scattered in the same city or county. By personalizing the results based on the customer’s location, search engine sites will send the customer to your nearest business location, increasing the overall customer experience.
Building a Personal Brand
In addition to location-specific content, and technical SEO business owners can also include another form of personalization known as personal branding. Using a personalized domain name with a personalized .me extension can help you leverage your professional reputation when presenting your business to your online audience. It also allows search engines to clarify what your business is about, especially if you combine an industry-relevant term and your name or nickname.
Personal brands in the professional world are vital for everyone, from freelancers, business owners, and others who provide their services on more than a single platform. Having a personalized name and brand will ensure that they stand out in search results when people search for them or relevant products and services to their business.
Besides boosting recognition, personalizing your brand also helps build trust by giving your business a name and brand identity that people can relate to. Both recognition and trust will help search engines push your brand to the top of the results page.
Using Search History for Better Results
When your customers browse online, they leave a digital footprint that will allow you to retarget your products or services to them. For example, suppose a customer browses your social media platforms, clicks on your ads, or looks up relevant services and products to your business. As a result, Google and other search engines will push your pages to the very top of their search results to make sure this particular customer gets what they are searching for.
Although you can’t manage how search engines utilize this information, you can use your analytics tools and data to create the right content to bring more traffic to your site. Keep in mind that this is not a one-time effort. You will need to continuously monitor and track conversions and click-through rates to provide more regular content tailored to your customers’ specific needs.
Language Selection Matters
When you have a business that exists to serve an international audience, personalization becomes a little more complicated than merely focusing on individual locations within a single country where you operate. You now have to think about culture-related nuances, the context for your content, and of course, appropriate alternatives when you cannot appeal to a new demographic with your original approach.
One of the many issues multilingual sites have is the simple choice to translate their pages on autopilot without considering the importance of cultural context. The keywords relevant in English might not have a direct translation in the target language, or they aren’t used in your new target audience’s search behavior.
As a business owner must ask yourself an essential question, such as, have you taken your audience into account when you’ve created translations of your pages? This is also important when your site is ranked, as relevance is determined based on the perspective of the search engines. Suppose you do work with an international audience. In that case, you must ensure that you have the appropriate local language translations and cultural context in mind to adapt your site to national search engines.
Content Optimization for Search Intent
Many companies rely on strict keyword optimization when working on their SEO. As much as this will always be essential, you also need to remember that it’s not just about the phrase but the intent behind them, which is used to define the search results.
This notion of search intent is vital in refining your SEO strategy to become more personalized to your audience and the individuals looking for your services or products. For example, if your customers are using voice search, make sure that your content provides value and answers to those questions. You can do this by adding internal links to make your content viable enough to rank for different search queries and use schema markup to give search engines a clear idea as to what your content is about.
The impact of personalization on your SEO strategy can help your business stay relevant in today’s digital world and hold higher rankings in search engine sites both locally and internationally. Now that you have a clearer understanding of how the two concepts can be used harmoniously in your business, it’s time to start incorporating them into your digital marketing plan. If you’re ready to increase your search engine rankings, reach a larger audience and personalize your SEO strategy contact us at Web Daytona to get a personalized SEO strategy for your business.