Are Your Top Web Rankings True and Identical for the Entire World Audience?

Perhaps you are pretty happy with your rankings after hiring some SEO company to work on your Web site. You enter your keyword phrase into Google and smile because you are showing up with a number 1 ranking. That was always good news before, right?

It is still good news but a more important question needs some consideration now since the "personalization of search" has come into play.

Keep in mind that if you are using any of Googles services such as Google Analytics or Gmail for example, "personalization" is activated automatically by default. What this means is that Google is looking at each users search history and tailoring the results to each persons search interests over time.

With personalization, Google can tell over a period of time, what type of content your perfer, what types of topics are most interesting to you as an individual. Is this something you want stopped, then no problem, you can go in and turn it off manually. The challenge for search engine optimizers is that the rest of the world may very well leave it turned on.

The reason why, is because it delivers up more personalized results and to the user, especially over a period of time. People want better search results that serve their interests. Even if you don't like the idea of personalization, the rest of the world does use it and it seems to be growing more and more popular.

So the question is this. What are you doing about making sure that your most correct audience is finding your content now (when you cannot trust the traditional ideas of ranking anymore.)

Why can't you trust what you see on a traditional scale of 1 to 10 search results?

Every person searching on a common identical keyword phrase, could end up in completely different rankings because of the personalization of search.

Furthermore, if you tend to visit your own Web site often or search on your competitiors, your history is being tracked, then you may often see your site rising to top visibility in search results, but this may be only for you and not the rest of the world.

Are your top Web rankings true and identical for the entire World audience?
Not any more.

Some proclaim, "The solution is simply to look at analytics reports."

While analytics can confirm your Web site is doing better or perhaps it's doing worse, it cannot tell you how to solve the issue of "personalization." By that, I mean anaytics do not tell you the actions you need to make on your pages to ensure you are being found by your entire audience. You may find that in your own mind you are doing well in traditional rankings, but it won't help your business if the rest of the world is seeing something completely different.

Even 2 or 3 different people logging on to the same computer, may see completely different results if personalization is activated for each of them and they all have various searching interests that differ.

For more details on Personalization of search read:
SEO Changes Part 2 - Are your sales dropping as your ranking soars?