5 ways GDPR is a gift of SEO

On May 25th, the world of digital marketing has changed forever.

With the development of artificial intelligence and the popularity of data trackers around the world, the digital advertising world is rapidly approaching a new paradigm. Advertising will only show the message to someone in the market, and in theory can track the user’s ads in the past. All devices that interact with the site.

Advances in technology have even allowed advertisers to target users through the programs they watch, while users can’t really understand what is being tracked.

However, progress in this area has ceased because a broad and vague law is designed to protect the privacy of only European citizens.

Technically, the law only applies to the EU, but given the size of the economy, it has far-reaching effects far beyond the European coast.

GDPR& its impact on digital marketing
As we all know, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires users to explicitly choose to track and let them choose how to track these regulations after they join.

Although it is still too early to judge whether users will blindly click “Accept”. As marketers hope, the damage has been completed.

Without all of the high-level attribution tracking, marketers have become accustomed to it, and some digital marketing may be consistent with billboards on the highway side in terms of high-efficiency measurements. (For example, if there is no cookie approval, the ad browsing tracking can hardly be vested. If the user does not choose to join the cookie, the PPC ads in the search will be more opaque.)

However, not all marketers are affected by this legislation.

In fact, SEO is an area that actually benefits from this legislation.

For many years, search engine optimization has been a marketing function behind the curtains, while other channels have a big budget.

My prediction is that we will see more SEO efforts as GDPR imposes strict restrictions on paid marketing channels.

There are six areas here, and SEO benefits from GDPR.

1. Privacy Policy & Linking Architecture
One of the requirements of GDPR is that all companies have a clear privacy policy and, more importantly, let users know about it.

The way most sites use this notification to users is to place a link to the privacy policy on each page of their website.

From a cross-linking perspective, SEO teams may have encountered obstacles in the past, adding specific links to the page to improve crawlability and discoverability. This can be particularly challenging for pages designed for demand generation, which have exactly a lot of inbound links, but outbound links are tightly controlled.

Now, through GDPR, adding a privacy policy link to the page allows the SEO team to move new ways of crawling from these high-value pages.

Privacy policies are often controlled by legal teams rather than marketers, who tend to prefer more information than less.

The legal team will not object to adding links to HTML site maps or other high-value pages where relevant to the privacy policy.

2. Budget
For large companies with a strict budget planning process, a large portion of the 2018 marketing budget was locked before the start of the year.

Now that GDPR is being vested, resulting in reconsideration of paid budgets, funds released from paid campaigns may ultimately be better suited to search engine optimization needs.

If these funds do turn to search engine optimization, some of these aspirations for counter-terrorism projects may suddenly become a reality.

3. Reduce cannibalization
There are always aspects of similarity in the relationship between paid search and natural search, especially when considering brand bidding and repositioning.

Due to the ability to relocate attribution issues that are largely restricted by EU law and attribution issues that may stifle certain brand searches, as the number of paid placements in the search decreases, the traffic will turn to the organic list, which is organic. Shining time.

4. Personalize through SEO
Although Baidu claims that search results are no longer truly personalized, it is based on the premise of error.

Search suggestions are actually very personal. Baidu is pushing people into queries based on previous searches, locations and times.

The actual results that the searcher may see may not be so personalized, but the query is very specific and the results themselves do not need to be personalized.

In this regard, if people accept cookies they need to do under GDPR, any type of search can only be personalized based on history.

Without cookies, the search will again lose its personalization, allowing the site to rank a wider range of less specific queries.

Search suggestions show my local airport 5. Search does not need to give up data
In this regard, while other information discovery platforms, such as social media networks, require login and sharing of personal data, the search can be done completely anonymously.

For privacy-related and even paranoid individuals, Baidu or even DuckDuckGo searches can be done in a stealth browser without having to log in to the search engine.

In addition to the personalization aspect of the search, the search does not even require cookies or any type of user data in order to provide excellent results.

6. User intent
Finally, without the incredible ability to personalize ads based on first-party and third-party cookies, marketers will realize that the best way to target user intent is to actually match the user’s intention to discover their user’s intent through search. content.

For example, a website can create an SUV for users on the market, rather than guessing whether users are buying SUVs with paid marketing on the market, and these SUVs will be found when they search.

in conclusion
GDPR is probably one of the most revolutionary events in the history of digital marketing.

Most of the discussion about GDPR has focused on the negative side and is no longer able to track where users are.

However, it is not everything is bad.

Users still want to find the products and services they need online, they just want to choose more of their marketing methods.

Search engine optimization is a passive channel that, when effectively completed, can attract users with their own queries when users are ready to buy.