Tagged suitably (seemingly) as “SEO conscription”, it is the methods big brands are using to help them manipulate the search results and further increase the control they have over their markets. It also helps to highlight the importance of branding – even for small businesses.

Search result personalisation is taking over. Not only is it making waves in the SEO community, but it’s also reaching out into other, more traditional forms of advertising.

In an attempt to make the search results even more relevant Google is using searchers web history to provide results tailored to their previous behaviour. This means that if a user has previously clicked through to a website from the search results, that website will get a preferential boost in the SERPs anytime a relevant term is searched for.

It is now becoming much more important to get customers to click through on your website in the search results. If a searcher has previously clicked through onto your website this helps give you a boost on the other thousands of relevant long tail keywords they could be typing in.

So how has this affected traditional marketing?

Most big businesses understand the importance of an online presence and most of the time you will find a web address on their promotional material, and adverts, both printed and televised tend to have the web address displayed as “visit us at [insert URL]”

Recently I’ve noticed an increase in the amount of big brands using the phrase “search for [keyword]” in their adverts. At first glance it may look like an attempt to reach a tech savvy audience and encourage action, but there’s a lot more to it than that.

To make it a little bit clearer how this works let’s look at the process the users go through:

John is considering a new mobile, but isn’t right at the buying stage. He’s watching TV and he sees the latest Sony Ericsson advertises and at the end of the advert he sees the line “search vivaz online”.

Now John is on the internet and he decides to follow the adverts instructions, and search for “vivaz”. He already has Sony Ericsson in mind and they appear on the first page (don’t even get me started on the results for “vivaz”, – if you’re going to get people searching for a term you better be number one!) Despite other websites occupying the number one and two positions, he already has Sony Ericsson in minds and straight away he clicks on the URL to visit the Sony Ericsson website.

What John has done is inadvertently given the Sony Ericsson website a helping hand when he searches on relevant phrases in the future. This is especially important considering John is at the stage of looking around for a new mobile phone.  Every time John looks for mobile phone deals he is going to be a lot more likely to come across the Sony Ericsson website, giving them more and more exposure and helping them to guide John on the way to purchasing his new (Sony Ericsson) phone.

With the conscription idea in mind, another very literal form of this is the adverts for the UK Navy. Applying the same scenario as before, once John has clicked through, anytime in the future he is looking for jobs the Navy are going to be coming up again and again. Have a look at the advert below:

This process applies to all businesses, both big and small, who want to increase their presence online. Get people searching for your brand, get people clicking on your website and see how it can help boost your rankings. This will become more and more of a feature in the future with search engines gathering data and constantly looking to return more relevant and useful results.

If you can get the customers to click through once, Google will do the rest