In February, Google added personalized search for every logged-in user, so now it's even more likely that your search results will be different than your friend's, your clients, or perhaps your marketing agency.   The goal of personalised search is to once again improve relevance by taking into consideration the types of sites that the searcher visits and prefers when returning search engine result pages (SERPS).

Some say that this will be the end of SEO as we know it.. but this is not the case.  At the end of the day, our job as SEO professionals is not to get a ranking in a page on a Search Engine ? but to deliver qualified traffic to and conversions on a web site for our client?s business.  This does not change ? we will naturally have to take more time to understand the ?communities? or ?neighbourhoods? that our client?s sites are currently included in ? and build reputation in these networks to ensure that our clients are being found where they are indeed relevant to the searcher ? but the principles and processes that we currently deploy are just as relevant now as they were last month.

The challenge may be in benchmarking our performance in terms rankings with our clients (as this is the first phase of our process ? get rankings and make sure that these rankings deliver traffic) ? but by ensuring that we are ranking in the ?non-personalised? / editorial listings then we can be sure that with the right amount of ?community management?, we will also be listed in the relevant personalised results as well which will result in more qualified visitors and more conversions as a result.

This will be an on-going discussion both internally at Vertical Leap and within the industry as a whole and I?m sure we will write much more on this topic over the coming months.