If you have an offline advertising budget, you can increase your rankings by leveraging a user’s search history.  You don’t even need a budget to accomplish this, what you need is a channel to communicate with potential customers and capture their attention long enough to tell them what to do.  You can use anything at your disposal, from a TV ad to your Facebook fanpage.

Strive to make the advertisement as intriguing as possible, but hold some information hostage – in other words, don’t tell them everything. Tell the viewers to search for a keyword phrase in order to find out the remaining information. Now, they will be motivated to search for your unique keyword phrase in order to find out the information you are holding on to. Somewhat like cognitive dissonance, people have an internal need to complete tasks and puzzles. By withholding information, people who are engaged with the ad are more likely to end up at your site (from searching) than if you simply give them all the information and told them to visit your site.

Setting this up is pretty simple: 

1. First, you will need to determine what term you want people to search for.  Look for a non-competitive term; while it would be nice to use a branded term, the focus needs to be on using a low-competition keyword. Use the Keyword Difficulty Tool to help determine the level of competition.
2. Now, dominate the SERPs.  Target your new favorite term on a couple pages capable of ranking for this term. The goal here is not only to own the first position, but also the second. Maybe utilizing a subdomain, or building a couple links, would help with this.  In addition to the pages you are ranking for the keyword, you will want to make sure that as many of the other results as possible support your domain. You may want to create additional social media profiles that target the keyword and send users to your domain (but don’t outrank your own site) or start a review on Amazon – just make sure it’s positive and encourages people to go to your site (preferably through searching for your brand). Make sure you are actually ranking for your term; as most of you know, personalized search can influence rankings, so turn off personalized search when you are checking rankings.
3. With your keyword taken care of and the SERPs in good shape, now you have to create your advertisement. Remember, this can be as simple (or elaborate) as you want, but make it intriguing so the viewer will want to follow your instructions to search for your unique keyword.
4. Finally, as you draw visitors to your site, put a clear call to action on your site, encouraging them to visit content they would be interested in. Don’t waste the opportunity of actually showing the user valuable content once you get them to your site.

Once your ad is being distributed through media channels, you can check your analytics. Look at your keywords report to see if people are actually coming to your site using the keyword you told them to use. If users are not coming to your site via the unique keyword, you need to go back and re-examine the ad content and your distribution channels.

If users are going to your site from the SERPs, it means Google will remember they have been to your site. With the increasing prominence of personalized search (about 1 in 4 searches triggers personalized search), Google will be more likely to increase your rankings when a user searches for a more competitive term that you are targeting.

When I hear SEOs talk about personalized search, it’s usually out of frustration as personalized search reduces uniformity in the SERPs.  While this can be a downside, it is important to focus on how to leverage this focus on personalized search to benefit your site. 

What techniques are you guys using to take advantage of personalized search?