Google+ Influences Search Results

It’s official(ish).

Only a few weeks into the field trial of Google+, and the new social network is influencing what we see in search results.

Check the picture below to see the new SERP for the query “search engine land” and notice Danny Sullivan’s shares (who I am connected to on Google+, as shown upon rollover).

How wide scale these changes are is still undetermined, but it should be expected to influence more and more results as more users adopt Google+. The latest count on Google+ users puts that number above 10 million. Your search results are becoming social. Fast.

What does this mean for Search Marketers?

Go befriend the Social team right now. Fully integrated Search + Social efforts will be more important than ever.

For example, let’s say your client is launching a new campaign that is targeting males, ages 34-42, in the U.S. Using these parameters as the target, the Social team will launch a campaign to generate interest among this audience and hopefully generate even more earned media in the form of shares and buzz. Typically, this type of campaign may be powered by Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. But, there’s a new kid in town, Google+. In the near future, successful Social campaigns will be tightly integrated with Search.

Wouldn’t it be incredible if you had the control to influence the Search result of your target audience? This is a huge step in that direction. The Social team will generate earned media within the Google+ network, engage the target consumer, and encourage sharing. The success of that last point on sharing will fuel the overall success of your Search campaign.

Search results will become the perfect blend of earned and paid media campaigns, whereby search results are altered by Google+, PPC, and SEO. Imagine this scenario: as a result of integrated Social, Paid Search, and SEO campaigns, your target consumer is now exposed to organic search results influenced by their Google+ network, paid search ads, and standard optimized organic listings. With this new layer of Social, you’ll be able to dominate search results like never before.

What does this mean for Measurement?

With this level of personalization, it will become more and more difficult to determine how your campaign tactics were successful, e.g. you improved your organic link ranking by 3 positions. How will you know that you improved your brand’s ranking for 60% reach of your audience? The short term solution is to test the correlation between increases in the number of Google+ and +1 shares against increases in organic traffic. There’s many more solutions and more are forthcoming, but we’ll cross that bridge very, very soon.

In the meantime, go buy your Social team some drinks and send them cookies daily. Or, at least +1 every single post they make.

Tags: +1, Google, Google Plus, Nick Brady, organic search

This entry was posted on Friday, July 29th, 2011 at 10:40 am and is filed under Digital Marketing News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.