Google Search Incorporates Google+ – Why is Anyone Surprised?

Karen    Business Tools and Resources, Opinion, Social Media     conversion optimisation, Google +, social media

Blog posts with inflammatory headlines decrying the latest move by Google to further link together its web properties, by incorporating Google + results into SERPs have been circulating the net the last week or so. I can’t help but wonder why anyone at all is surprised by this.

Google have signalled all along they are integrating their assets together – and why wouldn’t they? the incorporation of elements like the +1 button has been around for a while, providing you are logged into a Google account of any kind. And personalised search is pretty much unavoidable – even when you turn off search history, you will still get personalised and localised results.

Social search has become more and more significant, as the Google algorithm has shifted from a huge emphasis on links, to taking more and more heed of social sharing and social media networks to establish relevancy in search results. Over the last two years “freshness” has also become a significant part of the algorithm, as they allow for the fact that people are searching for the most current information on anything highly topical.

As for Twitter jumping up and down with utter ridiculousness – as was pointed out by Google, Twitter pulled out of their agreement to provide real time social search results last year – and now they protest? The example used by Twitter recently, of search results in Google for @WWE is also laughable. If anyone is searching for the Twitter conversations relating to WWE, surely they would be searching on Twitter?? If not, they could find their way there via the Google + results that were shown – if WWE has added their appropriate links to their business page About section.

I have been telling clients over the last few months that it is important for them to have a Google + business profile. A lot of them haven’t understood why, given there are less than 100 million members on Google +.

But I have been confident from the beginning that Google + results would show up quickly in search (which they did), and that ultimately Google will no doubt choose to rank results from its own social network higher than those of other networks – after all, why wouldn’t they?

The other reasons I have encouraged clients to get on this evolving network is because of the ability to use the video Hangouts for all manner of things, from sales launches and training, to communicating with clients or team members around the world and so much more. Plus there is the opportunity to effectively use Circles as a company intranet, especially for companies who don’t have the budget to set up a full on intranet of their own.

So it doesn’t concern me at all the direction Google is headed – it has been written on the subway walls for quite some time. My belief is that we are heading to a place where many of the old forms of search optimisation will become largely irrelevant, along with search rankings, and that drivers of traffic and conversion optimisation will become the key measuring stick.

What do you think?

If you enjoyed this article please consider sharing it!