Over the last couple years, Google has made several significant changes, just take a look at the infographic below.
Now add to this list a new change that’s on the horizon: Google +1.
This new addition is the merging of organic and paid search with social interactions. Here’s the theory:
You’re doing a search, and you really like one of the results. You hit the “+1” button. This now adds a “bookmark” in your profile for that site, increases how it performs in search for you, and increases how it performs in search for everyone in you Google network.
Google posted on their official blog last Wednesday the announcement with this explanation:
Our goal at Google is to get you the most relevant results as quickly as possible. But relevance is about relationships as well as words on webpages.
Does this really matter?
It’s really too early to tell how important this +1 button is going to be to organic and paid search. Google has released many products that fizzled at best when released (Wave, Google Me, etc). Time will tell us how important this particular change is going to be.
However, the +1 button is indicative of a trend. This trend is that search is becoming more social every day. Facebook is into the search market now, with a Web Search box right in their social dashboard. Tweets are now being indexed and added to organic SERP’s on both Google and Bing.
What do we do now?
Social Media Marketing has historically been looked at with two independent thoughts in mind: 1) SEO benefit or 2) market engagement. With what we’re seeing happen in search and the continued increase in social utilization, companies who are going to succeed must combine these two elements.
If you don’t already have one, start developing a Social Media Strategy that includes how you’re going to engage the market as well as how that engagement is going to provide SEO benefit.
Stay tuned as we keep our eye on this very important topic. We’ll provide additional posts as more develops with Google +1.
By the way, Google +1 is in Beta testing right now, so not everyone will see it right away.
Google Dance infographic sourced from Level343.
