impact of personalization on seo

It’s not that big of a secret that personalization has climbed on top as one of the most critical marketing requirements over the last couple of years. These days, about 80% of US consumers declare they are more likely to purchase a brand that provides personalized experiences, and as much as 71% feel downright frustrated when their shopping experience is impersonal.

This brings us to SEO – another pillar of modern digital marketing that seemingly doesn’t have too many similar goals to personalization but is just like it based on customer satisfaction.

So, is there any way the high levels of personalization can improve the process of SEO, and if so, what are its benefits? Let’s try to find out.


Producing the organic traffic

We could stop right here since organic traffic is what SEO is pretty much entirely built around. Organic traffic is a long-term investment and a measure of how successful your SEO campaign was. With that in mind, we must say that the top-tier number of organic hits can’t be achieved solely through technical SEO and keyword research. As we mentioned in the introduction, the present-day audience is craving for personalized experiences and professional content writing that align with their original search intent. Personalization can go a long way in meeting those needs, and although it doesn’t always directly correlate to SEO, it definitely boosts its results.


Improving the relevant SEO KPIs

At this very moment, Google’s ranking algorithms consider 200 different factors to determine which page deserves to take the spot at the top of the SERP. Personalization is one of them. But personalized content significantly influences bounce rate, time spent on the page, click-through rates, site usability, and numerous other metrics on how your website ultimately ranks. So, even though we still don’t have some precise KPI to measure how well personalization affects the final SERP rank, its overall effects more than spill over to areas that are clearly defined and, more importantly, measurable.


Forming a brand identity and improving its exposure

Developing a strong online brand and doing SEO are two processes that go hand in hand and often to mutual benefit. Essentially, exposing clients to strong, easily recognizable branding tools and putting out reliable content drastically improves the SEO numbers we have mentioned above. So, something as simple as, let’s say, buying a .me personal domain can turn your boring domain name and turn into something that’s much more striking from the branding perspective but also allows you to put relevant keywords right in the name of your website. Examples like this can be found in other areas as well.


Reinforcing relationships with the target audience

Google doesn’t measure just how many people visit your website. It also estimates how all these people spend their time on the website. Because of that, personalization serves as an excellent supplement that draws in the relevant target audience and allows them to use your website in a productive manner, ticking the SEO numbers to your advantage. So, let’s say you have gathered a list of prospective leads through lead nurturing channels. Personalization allows you to segment those customers into narrower groups and engage them with deeply personalized conversion content that will keep them glued to the website.


Building up a very strong local presence

These days, people are very well aware of the importance of local SEO for the success of one company. These efforts, however, usually stay limited to small-scale efforts where problems can be solved with local keywords and Google My Business (GMB) listing. If you, for example, want to expand internationally, you will have to remember that 73% of foreign customers prefer to purchase from websites in their own language. Leveraging their search intent and doing effective SEO is impossible only with the basic level of translation. These results can be accomplished only with effective segmentation and deep-level localization.


Ramping up the number of qualified leads

Last but not least, we would like to elaborate on something we have briefly touched upon previously in the article. Although you use drastically different methods, personalization and SEO both have one goal in mind – increasing the number of your clients. Because of that, the people who find their way to your company through the best SEO need to convert and make a purchase. As a part of this entire process, personalization either helps your company stick to the landing or gathers more info about the leads, segments them, and passes them over to other engagement tools like chatbots. Either way, your original goals are met.


Final Thoughts

We hope these few examples showed you the true value of personalization as a part of SEO and, even more importantly, the possibility of mixing several different marketing strategies for mutual benefit. As time goes by and customers’ expectations grow SEO – a marketing approach that was always considered too generic and technical – will inevitably drop its competitive efficiency. Putting more accent on personalization looks like a perfect way to tighten it up and make it sharper.