Earlier today I read a very interesting post on How To Exploit Personalised Search For SEO and it got me thinking. I’d been thinking for a while that attracting visitors early on in the buying process is likely to ensure a higher ranking when they get to the buying stage later on through personalised search, but these ideas go one step further, encouraging people to actively click on your SERP listings, unfortunately these techniques are a little difficult to apply to non SEO agencies.

When I first started at Bronco I wrote a blog post that basically ranked for the term “Start Thinking Soldier“, in the blog post I criticised them Army for encouraging people to go through Google instead of going directly to the site, as it opens them up to be hijacked by the likes of us. But I’ve now realised that this was infact a very clever way of encouraging people to “opt-in” to more of the British Army’s search engine listings.

So all those TV campaigns, not only are they creating a lot of brand searches, which no doubt gives the brand a lot of kudos in Google’s eyes, but also they are essentially getting people to opt-in to seeing more of their search listings through personalised search.

So how to take advantage of personalised search more?

• If you can afford a TV ad campaign, you’re sorted, but you can also do the same thing with radio, print advertising, display advertising and your business cards.
• This is kind of obvious for SEO, but write around your subject and also write about subjects which your customers will be interested in. For example, I might try and promote The Old Deanery by writing a blog post on Ripon Races or Ripon Cathedral – potential visitors to Ripon are likely to visit these posts and when they inevitably search for “hotels in Ripon” or “restaurants in Ripon”, The Old Deanery should come up.
• If you can encourage people to bookmark you on Google you’ll appear at #1 for a lot more searches, check out this bookmark for instance.
• You can try the method discussed in aimclear’s blog, where you link to a search results page and then encourage people to click through to your listing, for example SEO David Naylor.

If you have any more ideas of how you can take advantage of personalised search, please post them below.