by Corey Morris, emfluence Search Engine Marketing Strategist
There’s a big buzz around the new update Google made public recently called “Search, plus Your World”. If you haven’t heard the announcement, see Google’s Search Plus Your World Summarized for Marketers.
"Search, plus Your World" has caused quite a stir in the search marketing community on a number of levels. The short version is this: This update is the biggest Google update in a decade. While the hype may be overdone, it’s not something we can ignore.
Here are a few things that you should know about the "Search, plus Your World" update and some steps you should be taking to ensure that you are evolving your digital marketing activities to keep from being left behind.
The do’s and don’ts that you should take away from this update:
- Don’t think of your digital marketing activities (web design, web development, mobile, SEO, PPC, social media) as separate – they all impact each other. You might be able to scale some tasks and get more synergy by pulling the teams together more often, plus some new good ideas and understanding.
- Don’t write this update off because you may not believe in Google+ in general. Google has put so much money into this, it can’t fail. Even if it never surpasses Facebook and even if we don’t use it like we use Facebook, it isn’t going anywhere.
- Don’t be afraid to test. This is the time to test tactics on Google+ within your business page or personal profiles and to get some early adopter advantages.
- Do start thinking about engagement with your content more than about spiders and robots. We’ll need content that people want to read and engage with, not just stuff that will rank well and pull people into the site. The search engines use social popularity in the ranking algorithms.
- Do continue to do SEO. It has been called “dead” many times in the last 10 years, yet it has evolved and adapted. You want to be there in the organic results to be found when someone isn’t already aware of you. This doesn’t change.
- Do continue to monitor your competition. You don’t want to fall behind them if they are pushing forward on Google+ or with new strategies that will emerge in the days ahead.
We can’t guess the exact next steps or updates coming from the search engines, but it’s safe to assume that the two marketing activities of search and social will continue to collide. It is much easier to make minor adjustments to our existing marketing efforts than to try to catch up if we aren’t already thinking about the big picture of how they work.
If you haven’t started thinking about social and search together, it's time to start now.
