Personalization and SEO essentially have the same goal, to increase your revenue. However, they use very different tactics and methods to reach that goal.
SEO is one of the most important disciplines within online marketing, and it has been that for a long time.
High rankings, on the right search queries, can have a huge impact on revenue. Being able to climb one ranking can increase your Click Through Rate, which usually leads to an increase in revenue if you can convert the extra traffic.
The average CTR of page one, two and three in Google’s search results are 31.73%, 24.71%, and 17.66% – as expected, the further down the search results your page is located the fewer clicks you will receive. However, if you are able to move up a spot you will be able to increase your CTR significantly. Moving up just one spot in the search results can increase your CTR with 30.8%, of course depending on where in the search results you are located.
Google has 94.15% search engine market share, which means that Google has almost achieved a monopoly in internet search.
One of the goals of implementing personalization is to improve the customer experience, which in the end will increase revenue. When personalization is implemented on a website and the customer experience is improved, it will automatically also improve important metrics such as:
The percentage of single-page sessions, which means a user visits a page on a website and does not click through to any other pages but instead leaves the website. A study found that the average bounce rate is 58.18%, while B2B companies had a slightly higher average bounce rate of 61.04% and B2C a little lower at 54.24%.
The amount of time a user spends on a specific page influences the “time spent on site” metric. A Google search ranking factors study done by Searchmetrics, based on top 20 search results for 10,000 keywords on Google, shows that the top 10 URLs have a “time on site” of 3 minutes and 10 seconds.
The metric “average pages per visit”, shows how many pages a user visits on average on a website before exiting. This metric will often increase if you improve your bounce rate since they are closely connected.
When a user enters a highly personalized site, the user is more likely to stay longer and click through to other pages, since the products and content that they are shown are relevant to them.
When comparing users who have been in contact with a Raptor module and users who have not, the results speak for themselves. Statistics from our client Message, a Danish fashion retailer, show that users who are in contact with Raptor modules browse 5.83 more pages than users who have not been in contact with a Raptor module.
Likewise, users who have been in contact with Raptor modules spend 3.12 minutes more on the Message website, than users who have not been in contact with a Raptor module.
The longer a user stays on a website and the more pages they browse through, the higher the chance that the user’s stay will end with a conversion. Users who have been in contact with a Raptor module are twice as likely to convert, as those who have not.
Coop Opskrifter, Coop’s recipe- and cooking-universe, added personalization modules to their website. After the implementation, Coop Opskrifter experienced an improvement in their Bounce Rate.
The implementation resulted in a decrease of the Bounce Rate by 11.21%, which means that more users engaged with the front page content. This also improved Coop Opskrifter’s time spent on site and pages per visit.
Coop is one of the largest retail businesses in Denmark, with 1200 retail stores and more than 40.000 employees. Coop is the owner of the retail brands Kvickly, SuperBrugsen, Lokal’Brugsen, Dagli’Brugsen, Irma & Fakta.
In today’s world, users expect websites to remember who they are, which means that one size does not fit all anymore.
Personalization is also a great way to stand out from your competitors.
If a user goes from one website with personalization to another website without it, they are aware of it immediately and the result will often be that they leave the website quickly. If this is the case, metrics such as time spent on site, average pages per visit, and bounce rate will not improve.
Whenever a user has experienced a personalized customer experience, it will increase the chances of that user returning to the same website, to experience the same again. This will increase the amount of returning vs. new visitors that convert.
Read more: Best of Breed vs. Best of Suite
On very few occasions, Google gives their insights into what they value as important ranking factors in their search engine.
However, back in late 2017, Nick Frost, who is Head of Google Brain, confirmed that Google uses the relationship between user clicks on the page and how long they stay before returning to the search results, to determine rankings.