1. Never Stop Learning

Someone once told me that they knew everything there was to know about SEO. They lied.

Sure, there are experts out there but in a world that never stops changing, it’s impossible to know absolutely everything, particularly when it comes to search. This is why it’s so important to keep up to date, learn from the best, and share the knowledge so we can keep getting better. If there’s one thing I’ve learned these past few years, is that the search community never stops giving when it comes to great search and social media related content, tips, tricks and hard lessons learned, so there’s really no excuse not to learn.

There are so many changing topics we need to keep on top of, and 2012 will be no exception. We’ve been discussing search, social and personalized search for what seems like forever, but only now are things starting to get really interesting. 

2. Use Data Over Opinion 

Sales people think they are experts in marketing. Marketing people think they are experts in sales. Everyone is a guru in social media. Oh, and your website should be blue instead of red.

When it comes to marketing, search marketing, and social media marketing, there are a bunch of opinions out there. But the only opinion that really matters is that of the customer. A lot of direct customer input can be acted on through data that many of us can see every day, including:

• What are customers searching on
• What keywords convert the best
• What feedback you receive directly from customer surveys, tests, or social media
• What online comments, feedback, ratings and reviews customers are providing

2012 for me is not just about data collection, but how to analyze data to better educate, inform and improve business. Using data to answer tough questions, such as:

• Where to prioritize time, based upon the social media channels that your customers are active in
• Whether the content you produce is actually helpful for your customers or not
• Whether products are meeting customer expectations
• What other aspects of business you can improve on
• The list goes on…

3. Talk Less, Listen More

Ok, this is probably more of a resolution that I would like other people to adopt, but know I could do with a bit of this myself also.

Not only is it important to listen to what your customers are saying and listen to what data is telling you, it’s also important to take the time to listen to your peers and colleagues.

Some of the time, we can use data and experience to tell people whether they are speaking total crap. Other times we might just find we learn something new and completely eye-opening. I’ve stumbled on a good few golden nuggets recently, simply by listening. Definitely one to keep up this year.

What resolutions do you have?

Of course I don’t really believe that, but it seems like only yesterday I was joking about it. Yet, what do you know – 2012 is less than two weeks away.  

If search engines had zodiac years, 2011 would be the year of the panda… with a bit of honey badger thrown in for good measure. As usual, we saw countless updates to keep us all on our toes – from the string of Google panda and freshness updates, to other distractions such as authorship mark-up and schema.org, not to mention the arrival of the supposed “Facebook killer“.

So with all this going on, what key lessons did I learn this year?

1. Focus your Priorities

I’m not sure if you noticed, but Google et al. have no problem keeping us on our toes. And even though search marketers hate standing still, most days seem like having to go from running a ten-minute mile to a five-minute mile… and that’s not even taking into account your own company dynamics. Suddenly your smooth running track turns into an obstacle course, with several mud pools thrown in front of you along the way.

At any one time, there can be so many different areas to focus on and unless you have been blessed with unlimited resources, you simply can’t do everything (or at least, you can’t do everything well).

So what do you do?

• Figure out what’s important to your program and what’s going to give you the best benefit (unfortunately, this isn’t always what’s the most fun)
• Prioritize and do those things really, really well
• Action those areas that you can (or more easily) control, and plan out how to influence those areas that “tradition” says you can’t

2. Remember, “All for One, and One for All”

With all the updates this past year, one thing is crystal clear: you can’t succeed without a tightly integrated approach to SEO, PPC and Social Media.

SEO and PPC

SEO and PPC work together. There’s plenty of cannibalization discussions out there, but overall you do get an incremental lift when using both together (a 2011 study found that PPC gives a 89% incremental lift in total site visitors – above and beyond traffic you would normally expect just from SEO).

One of my key learnings this year included how to report on success. If you are reporting out on Search KPIs to upper management, I’m an advocate of having SEO and PPC numbers combined. If you have solid PPC and SEO programs in place, there’s just too much interplay between the two to look at them in isolation, at least at that high level.

Now at an operational level, of course you should monitor the numbers separately. But this is needed more in order to manage and understand individual contribution and performance on a day-to-day level, so that tactical adjustments can be made, as needed. This is where the detail comes into play since there can be many moving parts. However, most times this detail can be difficult to quickly understand unless you are living and breathing search 24/7.

Social Media, SEO and PPC

We also saw social media becoming an influence where SEO is concerned. As Google continues in its quest for G+ domination, we need to keep a close eye on the growing importance of social signals.  

On the PPC side, paid social (be it on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) has also been taking steps forward with improvements in targeting, reporting, and arguably set-up… depending on the platform! One takeaway (quite basic, but often overlooked) is to ensure that a portion of your overall search budget gets cornered off to support these paid social efforts.

3. Balance your Learning and Doing

Unfortunately it isn’t possible to always “do, do, do…” without also keeping up-to-date on important changes that constantly go on in this industry. Similarly, there’s no point in learning and knowing the “theory”, if you aren’t going to apply this knowledge and test it out for your particular company or program.

Yes, best practices can often apply on a general level, but if you really want your program to excel, you need to figure out the best practices that apply to your specific situation, and the only way to do this is through testing.

So make sure you learn. Make sure you apply. Make sure you to test. And then repeat over.

• Hot news topics (EG: the debt crisis, political movements, celebrity gossip etc.)
• Recurring events (EG: sporting events, conferences, holidays etc.)
• Frequent updates (EG: product updates, pricing updates, reviews etc.) 

According to Google:

“Different searches have different freshness needs. This algorithmic improvement is designed to better understand how to differentiate between these kinds of searches and the level of freshness you need, and make sure you get the most up to the minute answers”.

So with “freshness” continuing to be the name of the game for Google, what should search marketers be paying particular attention to?

1. Content Marketing

It’s not enough just to have great content anymore. You need to have great up-to-date content, and a steady flow of it, all the time.

This calls for a solid content strategy, which should include figuring out those important content topics, how you will support these topics over time, and in which channels – be it through blog posts, white papers, videos, press releases… or a combination of all.

2. Press Releases

For certain searches, news results now appear at the very top of the SERP. Make sure you work closely with your PR manager to ensure that press releases are keyword optimized prior to being wired out — particularly for searches that are being impacted by the news results.

Don’t just focus on news relating to product releases and updates, but also look for other opportunities to tie your company and/or products to newsworthy events, as well as regular shows/exhibitions/conferences that you have a presence at.

3. Ratings and Reviews

Ratings and reviews play an important role in helping to capture those long-tail searches and it also helps to keep your page content fresh through new product review information. This plays perfectly into the freshness update, providing even more reason to have ratings and reviews on your site, if you don’t already.  

4. Blogs

Blog posts on your website are a great way to share content on a regular and ongoing basis, and can compliment news-related topics well by showing a particular point of view.

It may be helpful to build out a schedule of topics (and writers) to help with a steady stream of content, since anyone can suffer from blogger’s block from time to time! Just like your press releases, make sure your blog posts are optimized for important keywords and encourage readers to comment.

More Useful Information

• Google Algorithm Change for Freshness to Impact 35% of Searches 
• Google’s “Freshness” Update – Whiteboard Friday
• Methods for Evaluating Freshness

When Google+ first launched, I explored some implications for search marketers. But with last week’s announcement, how might Google+ Business Pages also impact search?

1. Google+ Brand Pages in Search Engines

One thing I love about branded searches is guaranteed, quality traffic to your site. Now Google wants some of that action too.  

Google will be including Google+ Pages in search results, but it doesn’t end there. They are also introducing a new feature called Direct Connect which allows searchers to directly connect with your Google+ Business Page, simply by searching for “+[company name]” (ie: it takes searchers to your Google+ brand page instead of directly to your website).

Macy's Google+ Brand Page in Search

So make sure you grab hold of your company name page, particularly since no real verification is needed to claim a brand in Google+ (unless you are a mega brand, that is). It seems that right now, anyone can set up a business page for a brand (whether they are related to your business or not), so make it clear that your page is the official one. Also pay attention to your “About” section – include your website address and make use of the “Recommended Links” section on the right nav.

2. Business Popularity by the Number

All search marketers know that links have an important impact on rank — it’s a good indicator of content relevance and popularity and it helps to differentiate your website pages from other competing websites. Unlike page elements (such as title tags, heading tags, alt tags etc.), good quality links are not as easy to control, manipulate or copy.

Social indicators of business popularity and relevance (such as likes, tweets, and now +1′s) have always been the logical next step. But unlike Facebook likes and Tweet counts, Google owns the firehose of +1 data. We’d be naive to think that this won’t have the potential to impact business rankings within future SERPs.

3. +1 Your Site

According to Google, business pages will have an overall +1 count which will reflect not only the people who have +1′d your business page, but also all the people who have +1′d content on all the pages in your entire website.

So if +1 does become a part of Google’s ranking algorithm (and I probably wouldn’t wait to find out), then it’s time to get a move on with adding those official +1 buttons to your website and your page content, especially since the buttons help to send site traffic your way anyway. A recent Hubspot report found that websites that used the Google +1 button generated 3.5 times more traffic from Google+ than websites that didn’t have the button.

Additionally, with Google displaying +1 counts next to page results in the SERP, how are they influencing click behavior? For example, if the Number 1 result had no +1 information associated with it and the Number 5 result had hundreds of +1′s, are searchers going to follow the masses and click on the lower result which appeared more popular? 

Some early research indicates that results with +1 information does lead to higher click-through rates compared to results without. With this in mind, it seems a top result without +1 information would find it hard to maintain position. Whereas lower results with high social approval have good potential to move up the SERP.

4. Circles and Page Posts

With circles, there are definite opportunities to target certain posts to specific groups of customers or stakeholders through your business page.

However, before you can add people to circles, they need to add your Google+ Page first. This means that getting the word out about your page and adding regular, interesting content and discussion, will help to encourage following — similar to other social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

This typically takes time to build up though, so the immediate opportunity is to make your Google+ Page posts public so that Google knows to index your content publicly to appear in search results. As you share content on your page, remember to keep social signals in mind by pairing appropriate keywords with links in your posts, as well as building up those +1′s and shares to show content popularity. 

5. Product Category Pages

With Google+ Pages, you can set up more than one page for a business. One area which is particularly interesting is Product pages.

With Product pages, questions start to arise, including:

• Will Google start to draw links between business popularity and respective product category popularity to determine rank?
• Will the most popular product pages eventually start showing in the SERP above standard HTML pages?
• Will product pages have their own dedicated vertical in the SERP or be blended into results, similar to video? 
• Will product pages eventually be incorporated into the the Direct Connect feature?

…So many questions! What thoughts do you have?

More Useful Resources

• Google+ Pages Announcement
• Google+ Pages Now Open For Businesses, Brands, Places & More
• A Look at Google+ Direct Connect for Google+ Pages

As the benefits of PPC start to become better known within the wider organization, I’ve seen more adhoc campaigns surface in support of seminars and other events that physically take place in various cities or countries, some with better performance than others.

Here’s some lessons I’ve been learning along the way when it comes to launching a seminar (or any event-related) campaign in paid search, to help increase your chance of success.

1. Allow Time for Testing and Tweaking

I’ve found that one of the most important elements of a successful seminar campaign is planning ahead and giving it enough time to run. Unlike your ongoing paid search campaigns (which you’ve tested and tweaked for years and continue to do so), you have a finite time to get seminar campaigns right; once the seminar is over, the PPC campaign is over too.

One month or less is typically way too short. Two months is ok. On average, three months is a good amount of time to test and tweak a reasonable-sized seminar. However, if your event is a big annual event, then even a year seems reasonable.

2. Pay Attention to Geotargeting

It’s a well-known best practice to target your PPC campaigns to within the location that the seminar will be held. However, don’t just pick a set mile radius and stick with it — distance is an important component to test.

If your geotargeting is too narrow, then you could miss out on many opportunities to get registrants who are willing to travel to your seminar. I’ve seen a 100 mile radius work better than 50; sometimes the opposite. Finding the right distance will be dependent on a number of variables relating to your specific seminar (including appeal of content, quality of speakers, even your lunchtime menu!). So remember to always test and tweak your geotargeting to get the most out of each campaign you run.

3. Target your Adcopy

Set up different adgroups for different seminar locations, and for each group make sure you appropriately tailor the copy to each location. Include mention of the location, city, date, and if the seminar is free, call it out.

If you are running any free offers or appealing giveaways, then make sure you mention this too. It’s amazing the behavior you can encourage with mention of a free iPad drawing!

4. Test the Content Network

When you geotarget, you improve your targeting (and conversion rate percentages), but at the same time you’re working with much smaller numbers. Expanding out into the content network is a good way to try and increase reach, often at a lower cost per click.

Although you’ll see click/registration/conversion rates go down due to the increase in impressions, at the same time you’ll see an increase in actual click volumes and likely registration numbers. It’s a fine balance to get ROI right, which is why it’s always a good idea to test.

5. Capture Post Click Data from Registration

As with all your paid search campaigns, remember to make sure your analytics are set up on the registration page so you can track registrations back to PPC.

When registration happens on your own website, this should be pretty straight forward to control. However, if registration happens on a site outside of yours (perhaps a publication or partner site), you need to make sure they have the appropriate tracking in place in order to show the ROI on your campaign. If you aren’t able to track this, then take a hard stand and don’t start your PPC campaign until you can.

Here’s a few thoughts and questions that will be top of mind for me in 2012. The following doesn’t provide answers (as the answer will depend on your company and the maturity of your search program), rather it is intended to get the thought juices flowing!

1. Content

Once you have applied all basic optimization to your pages, link building — and content that is linkable – starts to become a pretty big deal. Do you have content on your site that people want to link to? Now take a hard look at the page you are trying to get links for and ask yourself, “Is this really something that people would want to link to?”.

Do you have resources in-house that can build new content or develop existing content? Or do you need to set aside budget for someone to help you in your mission for good, linkable content development?

2. Link Building

Once you have that content, how are you going to get people to link to it? Is specialist support needed to help you develop a cohesive link-bait program or do you have the skills in-house to handle this? Does it make sense for you to “prime the pump” so that you guarantee links prior to even investing time or money on developing content? If so, how will you do this?

What approach are you taking to build out your link graph? Have you really thought this through to the point that you have an actionable strategy in place, and is this strategy scalable? Link building, when approached right, can be more than a full-time job in itself, so if you don’t have resources to handle this in-house, you’ll need to set budget aside for agency help.

3. SEO and Social Media

Studies carried out earlier this year showed a correlation between SEO and social media. With this in mind, are your pages and content already set up to take advantage of social factors that are used to indicate content popularity and relevance?

If not, how will you get a handle on this? Is it a case of just including share and like buttons on your content, or does it play a more integrated role in your link building programs? 

4. Paid Ads and Social Media

Paid ads in social channels (such as Facebook, YouTube) can be an effective way to reach customers, when done right.

If you have not yet step foot into paid social media ads, is this something that you should be testing out? If so, do you have budget set aside to support this effort?

If you’ve seen success in social channels, is it time to split out your PPC media budget into traditional search and social search buckets? And of course, if you’re starting to scale up on these efforts, is paid social something you can handle in-house, or something that you’ll need outside help managing?

5. Beyond your Traditional Search Approach

If you’ve slayed the traditional HTML page results in the search engine results page (SERP), where else will you focus on your quest for domination?

Will you go after blended SERP results like video, images and shopping? Or maybe you need to give more love to the local country search engines like Baidu, Naver, or Yandex?

Perhaps you will focus on your results in social channels like YouTube or Facebook, or identifying some priority verticals in your market?

Maybe you decide that with all the updates going on lately that you will simply concentrate your time and effort on maintaining your good position in the main search engines because this is where you gain the most benefit, particularly with the resources you have available. Afterall, SEO is more like a marathon rather than a sprint, so you need to continue to hold onto your lead, particularly for your most competitive keywords.

These are just some of the thoughts and questions that I’ve been thinking about this past week. What other things are important to you as you start planning for next year?

Rather than declare, ”Because it’s 2011!” and list out the many logical reasons why companies should have reviews on their site, I thought I’d take a different spin on things. Here are three reasons why companies wouldn’t want to put ratings and reviews on their website.

1. Your product sucks

You don’t want to put ratings and reviews anywhere near your website because (shhh…) your product is a piece of crap. It’s difficult to use, parts fall off it, it’s overpriced, and you avoid talking to your customers because all they do is complain. It’s their fault for buying such a heap of junk to begin with. Losers.

Let’s face it, if your product truly sucked, you wouldn’t be in business for long regardless of whether you had ratings and reviews on your site; it really wouldn’t make much of a difference.

If however, you are proud of your company, have a good offering and are confident in the merits of your product, then what are you worried about?

2. You hate change

You’ve lived without ratings and reviews for decades and everything’s been hunky dory. Why on earth would you want to break away from the mold. Change is for the reckless –  just look what happened with all those dot.coms in 2000. That direct mailer you’ve been sending out for years comfortably gets a 0.21% fax back response. It’s doing just fine, thanks. 

Like it or not, change is constant; adapt or die. Yes, it can be scary, but the best way to learn, improve and do better business is to listen to what your customers (you know, the people who give you money) have to say. Take the good with the bad and act on it.

3. You don’t want people to say bad things about you

There are over 346 million web sites on the Interwebz, but you’ve convinced yourself that your website is the ONLY site that customers trust when researching your products. Customers only believe what they are told, so you only tell them what you want them to know; all the good stuff of course. You control the conversation because you’re the only one that’s talking. If you ignore the bad stuff then it doesn’t exist, and people are none the wiser… at least up until the point that you’ve pocketed their cash. Ker-chiiing!

Even if your product is really good, no-one — not even Apple (think Antennagate) — has a perfect product. If people have something bad to say, they will say it — be it on your site or somewhere else. Like it or not, the power has shifted and people now have more resources available to them to get the word out, and quickly. This is your chance to take control of the situation and address it in a positive way, for all to see.

So what are you waiting for?

If you are still wondering whether ratings and reviews is the way to go, listen to the voice of reason. If your product doesn’t suck; you want to grow and improve; and you are willing to put yourself out there to better support buyers, then you will ultimately be on the path to selling more. As a bonus, you can throw in the UGC benefit of all those long-tail searches too.

As with most things in our industry, there is never one clean-cut answer… That would be way too easy, right?! However, there are plenty of lessons to share regarding what has worked well and what hasn’t. In my opinion, simply using YouTube as a dumping ground for every single video your company produces is a misguided approach. To get the most benefit out of any marketing channel, you need to play to its strengths.

With that, here’s five steps to help you get the most out of your YouTube videos.

1. Figure out how to enchant people

Last week, I read an article by Greg Jarboe about Creating YouTube Ads Worth Spreading. I recommend reading it if you haven’t already (but come back when you’re done!). One part in particular stood out for me which supported my views on playing to a channel’s strength. In YouTube’s case, enchantment plays a big role.

As pointed out by Greg:

“…video content that can enchant people must provide intrinsic value to your viewers. This can come in one of four forms:

• Inspiration– “YouTube has brought to light thousands of inspiring stories of courage and bravery”
• Entertainment– “Some videos are plain-and-simple guffawingly funny” 
• Enlightenment– “These are documentaries similar to what you’d see on PBS or the Discovery Channel”
• Education – “Educational videos show how to do things”

This provides the ideal starting point when planning and developing your YouTube approach; to me it forms the backbone. I would argue that for most companies looking to develop videos for YouTube, Education will most likely take the leading form of enchantment where content is concerned. But of course, we can’t rule out Entertainment or Inspiration either.

2. Develop the content that people are looking for

The second step is to figure out what content are people looking for, that would translate well into video format. This step is absolutely key.

Going with an educational video example, there’s plenty of ways to get this information:

• What are the most highly searched for learn-related queries? Phrases like “what is…”, “how to…”, “learn about…”, “tutorial on…” all provide a good starting point. 
• What are the most common questions your sales, service and support people receive?
• What are the most viewed FAQ’s on your site?

This should provide you with a healthy list of video topics to focus on. It’s often good to prioritize the highest volume search phrases first. This is the point that you optimize your video to high heaven, developing your video to specifically address that topic and integrating the search phrase throughout the script.

I’ve found that YouTube content that was built based on a pre-defined customer need heavily outperformed content that had already been produced and then retrofitted to try to match a need after the fact. I tested two videos and compared them over a three-week time period. One was developed to address a popular search phrase from the outset. The other was retrofitted to a popular search phrase after it had already been produced. Both had no other ”promotion” to drive people to the video, other than search optimization.

Compared to the video that was retrofitted, the video that was optimized from the outset had: 

• Six times more views
• Five times more likes
• Double the comments
• Ranked 15 positions higher

3. Lose the stuffy, corporate facade 

Now don’t get me wrong. There’s a time and a place for company-branded animated PowerPoints and scripted monotone explanations. YouTube is not that place.

And that’s why we love YouTube. Good YouTube videos don’t have to be a high-production glitzfest. The more real and personal (warts and all), the better. That’s not to say that it should be all Blair Witch Project camera action, or devoid of all brand elements to the point that it looks like a completely independent third-party endorsement of your own company. The trick is finding that balance, and testing that balance to get it just right.

4. Ask for comments and feedback during the video

Applying traditional search optimization for video is a great place to start, but it will only get you so far. Ranking the highest when it comes to video requires doing well in social factors as well. The more people who like, share/embed and comment on your video, all seem to contribute to getting your video to the top. And of course it always helps to get more people to view your video in order to get more people to interact.

So throughout your video make sure you encourage interaction. Ask people to leave questions or comments, subscribe to the channel, or even provide a video response. Always remember that social media isn’t about shouting, it’s about interacting.

5. Promote

As mentioned, getting more people to watch your video helps to drive the view numbers, which helps to get people talking and sharing your video, which helps to drive more even more view numbers, and so forth. It’s all circular.

There’s a number of ways you can promote your video, be it sending out Emails, sharing through social media channels, promoting it on your website… One particular way I’ve seen strong, sustained results has been through YouTube Promoted Videos.

YouTube Promoted Videos is like doing PPC inside YouTube. It’s a really nice way to complement your SEO efforts and help to get even more people to your video.

With YouTube Promoted Videos you get to appear in the search results for your chosen keywords, as well as in the related/suggested videos list. Showing up in related videos is a really nice feature that speaks well to a typical YouTuber’s behavior of watching several videos at a time, in a given session.

The trick of course is keeping people on your video and trying to get them back to your site (or at least somewhere where there’s less distraction!), before they hop off to a video about dancing cats. And that’s the added benefit of promoted videos on YouTube. YouTube Promoted Videos also opens up the option of overlay ads within your video, that can take people back to your site. Don’t just take people back to your homepage though. Try and find a page related to your video’s topic where they can learn more or show them in even more detail, how to do that particular thing.

The Experts

Finally, a couple of recommendations of people who know their YouTube stuff. Greg Jarboe is of course a fountain of video marketing knowledge, and a fantastic speaker on the subject. And also Manny Rivas — I read a ton of his posts when researching for our YouTube efforts. Make sure you check them out.

That was two years ago. I got a response from Logan who told me to go for it, along with a link to an article about blogging tips. And with that, I was on my way.

When I started out, I wasn’t quite sure the reasons why I was doing it. There were no ulterior motives. All I knew was that this was something I wanted to try. For those who know me, this is not like me at all. For the most part, I’m not very spontaneous and will (or at least attempt to) plan for everything, much to the annoyance of the people around me.

So looking back on these past two years, what have I learned from the blogging experience?

1. Make time

Blogging is like going to the gym. At first, it can feel like a real chore; just one more thing you’d rather not be doing on your evenings or weekends. Unfortunately, blogging doesn’t happen by itself, you have to make time. There’s often a whole host of excuses reasons why you can’t write after working all day long, particularly when you first start out, or following a few weeks of blogger’s block. After a while though, you start to build momentum and it becomes just another part of your routine. Everyone leads a busy life. It comes down to making time for what’s important, be it blogging or otherwise.

2. Get it, by doing it

If your role requires you to get others within your organization to blog, you’re in a much better position to understand time commitments and ways to make the process easier through article planning, finding topic opportunities, or just giving them space to find inspiration, because you’ve been there too. Like most things in life, empathy is key. You can’t preach without having done it yourself.

3. Stay fresh

Blogging keeps your mind fresh. You find yourself a lot more up to date, aware of interesting discussions, information and perspectives on different subjects. It’s a great way to help you stop, step back and reflect on lessons learned, and challenge existing ways of thinking.

4. Points mean prizes

In addition to giving me a lazy cut and paste answer to the same old questions, blogging can often bring along some unexpected benefits. For me, it has provided me with experience to embark on other guest blogging pursuits and win free conference tickets. Score!

5. Get the bad guys

Sometimes it’s possible to use your blog to fight for the greater good. I don’t do this often (only once to be exact) because I don’t condone the whole “angry blogger” mentality. But of all the posts I’ve written over the past two years, it’s satisfying to see that this was the most read. I got a lot of support, particularly from the wonderful Tim Biden who worked his magic to get links into the post to help raise awareness of the bad guys.

Quickly, what is Google+?

Google+ is a new social platform; Google’s newest plunge in the social media space. When people have asked me what it’s like, I’ve described it as Twitter (without the character limit) in a Facebook interface.

Rather than friend people (like Facebook), you simply follow people (like Twitter) by grouping them into circles of friends. You define what these circles are, depending upon your own social circles. This makes it really easy to see and share information depending on your different social circles. For example, my non-search marketing friends no longer have to see articles about black hat PPC techniques (their loss!). Whilst my work colleagues don’t have to see pictures of me stuffing my face with ribs (unless they really, really want to).

In addition to Circles, Google+ have a bunch of other stuff going on like Sparks (content based on interests), Hangouts (video chat), and Huddles (group messaging).

After the anti-climax that was Wave and Buzz, has Google finally gotten social right? So far, Google+ has over 10 million users with over 1 billion items shared a day… and it’s still only in beta to a “limited audience”. The question remains, is Facebook set to become the next MySpace?

How do I set up a Business Profile?

Whoa there cowboy! Businesses have been told not to set up company profiles under personal usernames, but to hold out for specific Google+ business profiles which are coming and will bring with it deep analytics and the ability to connect the business profile with AdWords. Despite this, several companies have anyway (the rebels!), including Ford, Mashable and Search Engine Land.

So what does this mean for businesses?

1. The AdWords connection

Google+ opens up a whole new revenue source for Google (but of course!) by giving advertisers the option to extend AdWords beyond traditional Google search, onto the Google+ social ad network. Afterall, Facebook’s ad revenue hit $2B last year. Why shouldn’t Google want a piece of this too? But with this comes questions for search marketers, including:

• Will Google use social data in Google+ to serve up relevant paid search ads?
• Will social relevance be used to set different cost per click levels by advertiser?
• Will social relevance also have an influence on ad position?
• Will social targeting be utilized to supplement keyword targeting?

2. Impact on SEO

With direct access to all this additional social data, you’d be naive to think that Google aren’t going to get evil with it. You can also bet they’ll use it to determine future SEO rank through social relevance.

For a long time, linking has been used to determine page popularity and relevance; it has been the major factor in influencing rank. Social connections, influencers, sharing and preference (through +1s) is the next logical progression. We’ve already seen studies on how social sharing and preference on Facebook and Twitter has been correlated with rank. Now that Google has their own social firehose, watch out.

Now more than ever, it’s time to make social media a part of your website and ensure the content on your site is highly sharable. Make it easy for your visitors to share and push your content across their social graph. Just like Link Farms before them, expect to see more Like Farms, Tweet Farms, +1 Farms, Re-sharing Farms and people trying to game the social search system.

3. The application of Circles

Circles is a central feature of Google+ and has some interesting possibilities, one being customer segmentation and the ability for companies to better target messaging, testing and research through different circles. This can be particularly useful for larger enterprise companies with different divisions or distinct customer groups. Theoretically they can maintain a single company profile (instead of several) with messaging and interaction targeted accordingly.

There’s also networking and recruiting opportunities through circle connections, perhaps encroaching on LinkedIn territory, particularly when you couple this with impending Business Profiles, Hangouts and Huddles.

What other ways do you think Google+ will impact businesses and search marketing?

More Useful Resources

• How Google+ is built
• Google accelerates Google+ for Business Test Program
• Social Showdown
• What Will Google Plus Google Places Equal?
• Top 100 People on Google+