Does anyone know how dynamic/personalized website content affects SEO?

[Flock.Media]

A client using Marketo has inquired about personalizing their website content to be personalized based on a persona. To be clear, I'm talking about key website pages, maybe even the Home page, not PPC/campaign specific landing pages. For example, areas of on the site would change to display content differently to a CEO vs a sales person.

I'm new to marketing automation and don't exactly know how this piece works. Hoping someone here has experience or can provide pros/cons guidance. How would search engines work with this type of page?

Here's Marketo's site explaining what it does: https://docs.marketo.com/display/public/DOCS/Web+Personalization+-+RTP

[sergeystefoglo]

Hello Wendy,

Great question. First of all, if done right, something like this can be extremely powerful.

Here are some pros associated with this kind of persona targeting:

1. Increasing conversion rate (more personalized content = more people wanting to convert)

2. Increase in user experience metrics (things like bounce rate, time no site, etc.)

3. IF setup correctly, it could eventually lead to (potentially) less work in the long run for developers, etc.

With that being said, there are some things to watch it for. I wouldn't necessarily call these cons, but nonetheless.

1. Duplicate/thin content can become an issue if strict parameters, etc. aren't setup.

2. There is a possibility that conversion rates don't increase, and therefore you wouldn't be getting any ROI from this.

3. It can take a lot of time to make this system fit into your developers program/work.

It comes down to what the goal is for your website. If you are trying to test and see if (using your example), changing an image for a certain user would benefit the user experience/conversion rates, I would recommend doing some A/B testing first. Tools like Optimizely offer great ways to test out changes to various pages that you control. If a certain test goes well, then you could work with an automation tool to implement that change for specific users.

**TLDR; Can this work? YES. Does it take a lot of resources/thought? YES. Does it vary from business to business? YES. **

Hope that helps.

[Flock.Media]

Thanks, Sergey. Have you had much experience with implementing this type of feature on a website's main pages (not campaign focused landing pages)? I understand the power in theory but wonder how it would behave for user experience should someone from one position were to share the info to another in the company or different chain of command.

Secondly, you mention strict parameters need to be placed so as not to be seen as duplicate content. The search engine crawler would "read" everything at once, no? I'm wondering if a crawler would scan the entire page for all content and could perhaps be confused by the focus of a page if different features were set up to target different audience types. Or maybe it doesn't matter at all and I'm over thinking it?