As we have mentioned before in this blog, the world of SEO is constantly evolving. Just to prove my point, I originally started this blog post three weeks ago. It dove into my hypothesis on the effects of social media on SEO and how Google was slowly changing the playing field. And as soon as it was ready to publish, Google rolled out Google Search plus Your World (SPYW) and made my post, in a blink, outdated.
Social media is becoming a larger piece of the SEO puzzle. For those of you who are unfamiliar, Google Search plus Your World incorporates personalized search results from its own social network among normal SERP results. Depending on your search, results will now be preceded by links of your Google+ friend’s updates and photos (if you are even using Google+) that relate to your query.
For awhile now, Google has been slowly implementing social symbols into the SERPs – Twitter updates were incorporated, Google +1 buttons were placed alongside results – so it was only a matter of time before the marriage of social and search came together. But the current issue with SPYW, other than the fact that the results may not be as relevant as they were before, is that other social sites are not being properly integrated into the results at this time, making Google+ the shining star. And while this will likely change in the future, Google is making it pretty clear that everyone should be signing up for Google+ to get the most out of the web.
Google has also added a new box on the upper right hand corner labeled, “People and Pages on Google+”. When a search query is made, Google+ displays relevant people or companies and suggests following their brand. This will be an extremely powerful feature for companies. Having your Google+ page positioned front and center in the SERPs for relevant keywords is the main goal of SEO and it looks like Google+ might be making it a little easier.
So this goes without saying, but if you don’t have a Google+ page for your business, now would be the time to sign up and start. With the emphasis put on personalized searches (and social media in general) you would be doing your business a disservice if you weren’t involved with Google+. Plus with this new version of the web, and the fact that Google is making it a little difficult NOT to join, I would suspect that the amount of Google+ users will skyrocket in the next year or so. SEO and social has evolved, and with Google occupying around 85% of the search market, we are at their disposable to evolve with them…even if that means finally signing up for another social media account.
