Cirrus has always put an emphasis on educating our clients. Before we even started doing online marketing webinars and seminars, we dedicated a significant amount of project time to empowering clients with tips and advice to improve their online marketing, including search engine optimization and what has now become known as social media.
For the past several years we have been repeatedly harping on how social media is going to be ever more important to search engine optimization, visibility and clicks. Yesterday Google sent the clearest signal yet. The time for action is now. Actually the time for a social media strategy was years ago for many businesses, but let’s not quibble over nuance.
Yesterday Google released ‘Search Plus Your World‘, which melds Google’s new social network Google+’s search inline with Google’s normal search properties. And while some social has been appearing in SERPs (search engine result pages) for years, this level of prominence is so pronounced to actually draw fire from competing social networks like twitter.
To help understand how this impacts you or your companies visibility in search, consider that a searcher may see different search results if for example:
- They are using incognito or other browser privacy mode.
- Not logged into Google, cleared data, history and/or cookies.
- Logged in and has not cleared the aforementioned data.
- Logged in and socially active on other networks such as Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, et al.
- Logged in and have a Google+ account, unless they use the button to hide personal results.
- Have opted out of personalized search altogether.
In short, there are instances where your more socially active competition may show up in Google search results, and you will not.
Late last year, one week after the launch of Google+ Pages for brands and businesses, we ran a Google+ webinar and seminar where we asked our clients to wait for Google to fix ownership and notification issues before jumping in. Google fixed those issues in late December and we changed our stance to go, go, go. We are now urging those of you who still have not, to jump in. Need more proof? This has changed visibility of brands on Google.
Not sure how to get started? Let us help you with your social media strategy.
