My first post on this site was a rant about how I hated personalized search. While it still holds true that I don’t care for it much for my own personal use, it could actually be helpful for you and your site. How could this possibly benefit you, especially if searchers only see sites from the top of the search results click on them and then of course they’re staying on top. Don’t despair you still have a good chance of getting in there and if you do and they have personalized search results switched on you should stay in there. If this sounds good read on and find out my two cents worth on this subject.
As you may already know by now, Google’s personalized search results are switched on by default. Which is good news for you, let me tell you why I think that is; every time someone performs a search for your domain, a branded term you use, or anything else that deals specifically with your site their result pages will be biased towards your domain. Which in my opinion is great news, but now the only trouble is how do you get people to start searching specifically for your brand?
There are a few great ways to get people interested in your brand and get them to start searching for you.
Article writing: As I have mentioned in some of my other posts, article writing is a great way to build links back to your site. However with personalized search, I think it presents another opportunity for you to place yourself in front of a bigger audience. To do this I would recommend placing some brand specific words in the text of the article, and possibly try and provoke the reader to search for your brand.
Guest Posting: This is of course another great way to expose yourself to a bigger audience. Once the visitors on the other site have read about you, if they are interested they may even perform some searches looking for more of your work. So once again if possible I would recommend working in some of your branded keywords in order to get those readers to search for you specifically.
Offline advertising: I think that this is an often overlooked method, however it could prove to be very important when trying to gain a bigger visitor base. There are a number of methods you could use to accomplish this including radio ads, television commercials, buying ad space in an offline publication, and the list could go on and on. The biggest thing you will want to focus on when trying this method out is making sure that your ad clearly conveys what you would like to happen. In this case you would like your audience to perform a search for one of your branded keyword terms.
Of course there are many other methods that can be used when trying to get someone to search for your site specifically, but this would turn into an endless post if I tried listing them all. If you have any other methods that you like in particular feel free to share them in the comments.
Also as an important note, before attempting to accomplish this you should make sure that you own the search results for the particular keywords you will be having people search for. If you get them to search and they end up at some-other site this method will prove to be pretty worthless and will even hurt your efforts to gain more traffic.