Google Local Search Should Not Scare You

Google sparked a fire in the SEO realm this month when they announced the combining of data from Google Personalized Search, Google Personalized Homepage, and Google Search History into a single personalized Google search experience. Google's goal has always been to give you exactly the information you want right when you want it. With the growth of the Internet and all the new information coming online every day, this might sound hard. They're constantly trying to improve the quality of your search results. One of the ways they're tackling this is by personalizing your search experience. After all, you're the only one who actually knows what you're really looking for.

Now if you're signed into your Google account using GMail, Google will serve you modified search results based on the search listings you've clicked in the past, as well as the widgets you have installed on your personalized homepage, pages you've bookmarked in Google Bookmarks, and other data sources. This makes SEO specialists nervous in that it's going to be increasingly difficult to say, your site is #1 in Google for a specific keyword. That's because pretty soon everyone's going to be getting somewhat different search results. Maybe even more disturbing for some SEOs is that they'll no longer be able to base their pay-scale around the rankings they're able to achieve for a client. It's difficult to tell a client you placed them in spot #1 when their own personalized Google shows their site in spot #4.

People have been getting personalized search results from Google since June 2005 when the program was first rolled out. Most people haven't noticed because changes have been subtle. Thus far, it hasn't changed the way we get traffic to our sites. What has changed is that Google is increasing the number of data sources they're pulling personalization info from. Most of us get slightly different results anyway, even without personalized search because Google's search results are pulled from different data centers contingent where you're located and most data centers have a unique copy of the Google index.

Being in Florida we frequently see different results than those in California, Nevada and Brazil. This means that it's time for SEO experts to become SEM or search engine marketing experts and to stop basing their compensations based solely on rankings. SEM is about getting the largest number of paying customers to a site, not about top spot vanity-rankings meant to impress others. Even if we all agree that personalized search spelled the end of the professional SEO you need to make the adjustment because Big Google sure is not going to change for you.

Google's dominant and quickly increasing search market share means they're the Big Dog and the one's who choose what they serve. It's not like there's any choice about whether or not to adapt to their system for search results. In the long run, Google Personalized Search becomes just one more reason you should focus on writing the best title tags and compelling descriptions for your pages that you possibly can. After all, the pages with the titles and descriptions that users find most compelling are the ones that get the most clicks and are the primary factor which influences Google Personalized Search.