Search engine optimization is mercurial. Things are constantly changing, which means that internet marketers must change with it in order to get the best returns from their PPC campaigns, for example. Following are two recently announced changes by search engine giant and ad network Google that every pay per click marketer needs to be aware of.
Site Speed Matters: When a user clicks through from you Google AdSense ad, your landing page had better load quickly. Why? Because Google is considering using site speed as a ranking factor.
While the company has come right out and said emphatically that it plans to do this, the fact that it’s even a part of the conversation means that at some point they probably will. Also, they’ve rolled out tools webmasters can use to speed up their pages. Learn more about this at Google’s Site Speed site.
Personalized Search: This has caused a big hullabaloo lately. What exactly is it? It means that when you conduct a Google search, it returns results that are tailored to what the search engine thinks is most desired by the individual user as opposed to a more general relevancy for the average person who may be searching the web.
To explain by way of example, let’s say you conduct a lot of searches for home décor tips and click on results from HGTV.com often. Accordingly, Google might rank HGTV.com higher on the results pages it returns the next time you do a search for home décor ideas – simply because it sees that you go to this site often.
Why is this important to you as an online marketer? Think about it this way: if web users are getting more personalized results, it can fragment your target market more. This makes it harder for you to reach larger numbers of prospects.
While you can’t change what ad networks like Google do, you can stay abreast of the changes and adapt your SEO and pay per click marketing strategies to continually maximize your return on investment.
