In an effort to make search richer, and more relevant to users three new search features have been announced:

1. Profiles in Google search.

This works in Instant, as well as normal search engine results. This is an easier way to connect with people you are looking for, as well as a quick link to those you are already connected with. For example, if you are searching for a friend in your Google Plus circles, your search box will auto-complete to your friend, rather than strangers with the same name.

As well as shortcuts to your friends, Instant will also auto-complete ‘prominent’ people on Google +, be it contributors and authors of Google’s Authorship program, or celebrities or other well known users.

2. People and Pages.

Searching for broad topics will now show prominent people in Google + on the right hand side of the results page, who frequently talk about, or are associated with the topic searched for. This means you can then connect with the people or communities who have similar interests.

3. Personal Results.

This will return more relevant search results to you via your friend’s recommendations, Google + posts and photos based on keywords in captions, comments or titles. Although this gives you a more personalised search, it will be more convenient for some searches more than others, and don’t worry – there is a link at the top of the results page so that you can revert to regular results without the personalisation. You can also permanently change to ‘regular’ results in your search settings.

This new breed of search has been named ‘Search plus Your World” and is being rolled out all over the English speaking world in the next few days. It brings together social networking and search all in one place, allowing you to find your own things on the web, as well as your posts, and friends posts and people you might like to meet.

For the future of internet marketing and SEO, it is a good time for businesses to incorporate a Google Plus page into their social repertoire to take advantage of these new search features.

Similar to Facebook Pages, everyone can now create a page for their business, local store, favourite band or sports team. You can add pages to your circles just as you can with individual people, and you can also start a ‘hangout’ and share posts.

Integration

Only a day or so old at the time of writing, it will be interesting to see the tools and features that Google Pages will have that are of benefit to businesses in particular. Already, there is a type of integration with Google Places, simply select “Local Business or Place” as your intended page type and you will see that the set up is similar to a Google Places listing, with it asking for hours of business, logos and contact info. In future, a full integration with Places or linking between the products seems likely.

Facebook Comparisons

One benefit of Facebook Pages that Google is yet to implement seems to be the ability to assign other users as administrators of the page. With Facebook there isn’t much harm in all employees using the same company account to post, it’s more for convenience, however with Google there are Gmail, Documents and Checkout details that are all linked, and sensitive information could accidentally be shared.

Direct Connect.

An important note for SEO providers, Google Plus Pages are already fully integrated into search results. There is already an option in a Google SERP to refine by ‘Social’ (Just click ‘more search tools’ on the left hand side menu when logged in), but now just by adding a ‘+’ in front of your search, you can automatically be taken to a Google Plus Page if it exists. Called ‘Direct Connect’, it is still in experimental stage so will not work with all Pages just yet, linking your website to your Page it seems, will increase the chances of it being picked up for ‘Direct Connect’. See it in action in the video below.

Customer engagement is more than just greeting your customers by name and being pleasant on the phone. If you have a Facebook, Twitter account or any other type of forum for customers to leave comments, then you need to figure out what ‘voice’ to use when you engage with them.

Look at your industry

The first thing to think about is the type of industry you are in. A take away food shop isn’t going to talk to their customers the same way a large public company would. Make sure your voice aligns with your company, your branding, your attitude and what goals you have for your social connections. You don’t want to alienate existing or potential customers, because as you may know, if you say something on the internet, it will come back to haunt or celebrate you in the future. Work out what you want from social networking, and create a presence that reflects you and your company.

Whose job is it anyway?

In 2009, a ‘rogue’ Domino’s employee made a video of the disgusting habits of staff in one of their USA stores, uploaded it to YouTube and destroyed the credibility of the brand as it went viral. Thankfully the CEO, armed with his PR team and SEO provider, went into reputation management mode and order was restored.

While you won’t always have control over people from the ‘outside’ who want to harm you, you can control who is in charge of officially engaging with customers. Whether it’s yourself, or a trusted customer service employee that has the right touch, you need to be aware of how complaints, compliments and comments are handled on your social networks. Bad language and grammar can turn customers off, as can late replies or ignoring them completely. Think about whether your voice is the voice of the brand; that is, faceless, or if you have a personality whom will represent you.

What is your message?

This builds on and combines the two points made previously; what is your company style, and who are we talking to and why? Some companies use Twitter and Facebook to spread promotions and competitions, while others use them to update customers on product updates and industry news. Less formal organisations will engage customers with games and quizzes. If you have a blog or community forum, think about what the aim of the conversation is, as you may well want something different to what you would reveal or say on Twitter for example.

As any business owner knows, reputation management is an ever growing responsibility. Choosing to connect with your customers online can be a great way to let them know that you value their business and feedback, but if the engagement falls into the wrong hands, or if you aren’t clear about your message, you could be wasting your time, if not hurting what you have already cultivated. Treat your customer engagement in social media the same way you would speaking to them in person or on the phone, in a professional, respectful way that reflects you and your company.

1. Different Locations.

You may have noticed that when you do a search in Google, it has your estimated location in the right hand menu. Google can figure out where you are by checking your IP address. Your Perth SEO may get different results from you if you are located elsewhere in the state or even across town.

This means that if you are searching for something that may have multiple locations, such as a bakery, your browser is more likely to show results closest or more convenient to your location, which is why Google Places listings are so important for businesses with a retail or physical location.

2. Web Browsing History.

The top search engines actually personalise your search results based on your preferences and browsing history unless you opt out. This will affect what ads you are shown both in SERPs and on the Display network (Where you will see ads on a website rather than the SERP.) as well as the natural or organic search results.

For example, if you are signed in to your Gmail or other Google product, your web history will be recorded unless you opt out. If you are not signed in, cookies will be added to your browser in order to keep track of you until you clear your cache or browsing history. You can read about this in more detail in our previous article “A new way to target customers.”

3. Universal Search Results.

In the last few years, search engines (Esp. Google and Bing) have been combining all the possible search results into one list. Places, News, Images, Video, Dictionary and even white papers will be interspersed with the general results. You can refine this into specific areas by clicking on the right hand side menu (In Google), such as ‘images’ and then back again by clicking on ‘everything’.

This means that again, depending on the first two reasons above that your results may be different; you may be seeing extra Places results making your listing either higher or lower.

4. Social Media.

Depending on your adoption of Google Plus or the use of the +1 button, your results can also be skewed by your friend’s behaviour on the internet. For example if someone in your Gmail contacts or chat list has clicked +1 on a search engine result that you may also be searching for, that particular result may appear higher than it would naturally because Google can see that one of your friends recommends it. You can stop this by signing out of your Google account before you search, as with point number 2.

5. Data Centre Discrepancies.

While Google continually updates its data centres and index, there is no way for you to choose which one you are seeing results from. For example, if your SEO’s browser IP is returning results from one data centre, yours may be returning results from a completely different one. One data centre may be still updating it’s index and for this reason, your keywords ranking may be one or two positions different. Some SEOs call this the ‘Google Dance’ and you will usually see your positions stabilise over time as the data centres catch up with updates.

So, when you understand all of the reasons why your rankings won’t be exactly the same between two computers, it gives you a good foundation with which to monitor and understand why some times your keywords may seem to bounce a little.

While some of them are out of your control, if you keep an eye on your browser history, and social media impact you can get a clearer picture of your rankings, however it does pay to take in the big picture.

Facebook eclipsed MySpace years ago, although there are still some dedicated users of MySpace, and so we are all wondering if Google will do the same to Facebook. Comparing the two, at the moment, they are very different, and there are pros and cons to both platforms. As with the ‘war’ between MySpace and Facebook, it seems that the target audience isn’t the same and is therefore not a completely fair comparison, but since Google’s reach is so wide – it is sure to give Facebook a run for its money.

The huge advantage of Google, is that you can be logged in to Plus, and still use all the other Google products you love without having to keep a tab open, or logging in repeatedly. Access to it is right in your Google account, so you can check Gmail, your Analytics etc all at once. You can also browse the internet the same way you always have, and ‘Plus 1’ things as you see them. Facebook’s search engine capabilities are weak in comparison, powered by Bing; it will show you just a few results when searching, purely because the search bar’s primary function is to search within Facebook.

As of the 13th July 2011, visits to Facebook accounted for almost 40% of the world’s internet traffic. So as far as user reach, Facebook is winning hands down, and to a lot of users, it will remain in top position. Over 50% of Facebook users utilize 3rd party applications such as games and quizzes, whereas Google’s interface is starkly clean. To some users, this will be the clincher. Facebook cleaned up it’s act in 2008 with ‘New Facebook’; cleaning the profile page up and removing app widgets from view and instead adding them to a menu bar, but Google is starting fresh, having already learned from Facebook what users prefer.

Key Differences:

1. Facebook has fan, event and business pages, Google’s are used solely for individuals. (At time of writing)
2. Google Circles make it easy to control who sees your updates, with a drag and drop feature that is effortless. Using Facebook Lists is not very user friendly..
3. Facebook Games. While not everyone loves Farmville and Mobster Wars, they have their place. There are rumors that Google will release an app developer for this kind of thing, stay tuned.
4. Google Plus doesn’t have a private message function, however if you are logged in, Gmail is right there in your menu along the top of the page.
5. Facebook Chat vs. Google Hangouts. Facebook utilizes a text based chat system, and now a video chat via Skype. Google hangouts can host up to 10 people in video chat at once.
6. The biggest difference, within Facebook, you must manually accept or deny friend requests, whereas in Google Plus, you simply ‘follow’ a person if you want to see their. They can then choose to segregate you to a Circle which will get posts depending on their preferences

Google Circles are a fast way of editing who sees what on your profile. You can update with a public post, in which case, if your profile is public, then anyone who wants to can see it. You can also add your followers to separate Circles, the default ones are “Friends”, “Family” and “Acquaintances”. When writing a post, the dialogue box will prompt you to select which circles will be able to see it. People can’t see what the names of your Circles are, so I imagine there is some private-joke fun to be had naming them!

What will change for search?

If you have a Facebook account, think of how highly personal the information stored within it is. Facebook knows who your friends and family are, it knows where you go for dinner and whose parties you go to. Even if you don’t use the check-in facility, if you socialize with a friend who does, they still know the places you might frequent in the real world, as well as your birthday, occupation, favourite TV shows and maybe even foods, depending on how complete your profile is. This is how the Facebook ads target you. Think about what will happen when Google builds that kind of database, potentially with it’s entire user-ship.

It’s not too hard to believe that soon Google will tailor search results based on Plus 1’s, your search history and personal information as Facebook does. This will mean a huge opportunity to Adwords advertisers, so keep an eye on new developments. There will be the odd cry that this is an invasion of privacy, but in reality, this information is already out there in Facebook, this just takes it out of the social networking platform and uses it globally; which, you may or may not agree with. Luckily, you do have the option of not logging in before your normal search and browsing habits!

Once upon a time, blogging was just considered a tool for angst ridden teens and those odd people who stayed up late at night, complaining about sci-fi shows. These days, blogging has become an invaluable tool to promote your business, hobby or online store.

A blog is a great way for you to spread information about your expertise and business without sending out a hard sell marketing message. This information can be shared between customers, colleagues, employees, partners and prospects in an open and interactive exchange. Even free blog platforms make it easy for anyone to make a professional looking page with commenting features and post updates.

Building Credibility

If your business is a niche industry, or even if you sell or provide a service that many people require, a good way of getting your business’ name out there is to become an authority on the subject. For example, if you sell exercise equipment, you could regularly post about health, fitness or nutrition tips, customer experiences and exercise ideas. Giving your customers something of value for free instead of a hard-sell message will reinforce your blog as a resource of credibility. Linking your blog to your business website so they know that your information is sound is the idea here – you wouldn’t read a blog written by someone with no experience in the industry.

Visibility to your business’ website

Many times, customers will be searching for information about products and services, rather than looking to buy immediately. If you are providing fresh content and information about your industry, then potential customers will be more likely to buy or contact the source of the information. As you create a dialogue with your customers and prospects, you have the opportunity to show them how your products or services differ from your competitors, and then show them your products or services on your business website.

How do I build a Blog?

The best thing about a blog is that you don’t have to be very technically minded to set one up. While it’s best to get some sort of advice on how to set one up, there are many free blogging sites that are fully customizable such as: Blogger.com, blogspot.com, wordpress.com and livejournal.com to name but a few. The best way by far is to build your own customized blog with a URL that contains a keyword or two that is related to your business, this is a relatively low set-up fee compared to a regular website if you need to use a web developer.

Do I need a Blog?

Before you jump into any new online venture, ask yourself what your goal is.

What do you want to do with your blog? Will you use it for promotion, market research, to increase your database or as an educational tool?

Who is your target audience? You can’t cater to everybody, and not all of your customers or prospects will respond to a blog. This is where you will have to research and identify your key audience, which might be completely different to your other forms of marketing.

Who will write the content and what do I write? If you are a small business owner, you may not have time to write a daily or weekly post. Think of who this task will fall to, and what kind of dialogue you want with your customers. Something too formal will sound like a sales pitch, while too informal will sacrifice your authority on your given subject. It’s a good idea to map out topics in advance so that you aren’t posting what you had for lunch or a photo of your pet at the last minute! A few ideas for topics: Respond to frequently asked questions or complaints, announce new products or discuss new technique or use for an existing product.

Social Bookmarking

If you already have a Twitter or Facebook account you can add a social bookmarking link so that your customers or readers can ‘like’ or re-tweet your posts. In the case of Facebook, clicking ‘like’ will post your link to the user’s wall, giving your exposure to all of their friends and connections. Social bookmarking can be the best word-of-mouth advertising available, as you are instantly connected to literally hundreds of thousands of potential customers.

With a bit of research and diligence, any business can benefit from a blog. It is the perfect social tool to keep your customers up to date with your products and services, as well as educating them on the benefits of your products or expertise.

Not yet launched in Australia, the +1 button will appear in Google’s search engine result pages, Google Adwords ads, and any private page where the button has been embedded (as Facebook allows you to do with their ‘like’ button).

Used in a similar way to the Facebook ‘like’ button, the +1 button will be used to recommend pages, Ads and search engine result links to the public and your Google social network. Both Facebook and Google’s ‘social’ buttons will help web users judge the value of content recommended by others, however the main difference is that Google’s +1 button will publish the recommendations within their search results to everyone whereas Facebook publishes ‘likes’ to your Facebook wall and pages with an embedded ‘like’ button.

How do you use Google’s +1 button?

The +1 button will appear next to the title of each website in any given Google search results page, and on any PPC ads that appear either above the organic results or along the side. If your friends have already visited a site within those search results and have clicked ‘+1’ then their Google user names will appear along with how many public ‘+1s’ have occurred. Don’t want your user name published? You can go into your Google account settings and set it to private

Who or what is my Google social network?

At the moment, if you have a Google account, your social network will consist of your Gmail contacts and Google Talk lists, Google Contacts list and anyone you follow with Buzz or Google Reader. There is no plan yet to extend the +1 recommendation to your Twitter or Flickr contacts, but using Google to connect to your external profiles may be rolled out in the future, as the +1 button gains in popularity.

Improving search results with +1

Social search will be a useful way for searchers to see answers and pages that are recommended by friends without being logged into a social media platform (with limited ability to browse), such as Facebook. Google has been experimenting with social search for a few years, but with the launch of the +1 button, explicit recommendations from people you know and trust are at the forefront of the user experience.

Matt Cutts from Google states “This change continues the evolution of social search, and it’s a natural progression to improve the search experience”, but will Google‘s +1 button evolve to influence Google’s organic search results? Matt has hinted that it may be a possibility – “The primary benefit is that search gets better, and we’ll look at it as a potential signal to improve search quality as well”. Looking to the future, just as Google Local search has changed the way that search results are displayed, positioning could soon be based on your website’s ‘social reputation.’

1. Keep it simple:

Avoid writing complicated concepts in small twitter-sized spaces. The main reason that you should not do this is because twitter and ‘walls’ mimic individual human thoughts, not multi-thought concepts. If your post is too complex, people will tend to ignore it in favor of the no-brainer tease or day-job-killer video. Alternatively, it would probably be more profitable if you should provide a very simple but interesting question about a topic and provide a link for them to get more information.

2. No acronyms and minimal industry jargon:

Refrain from using acronyms and other hard to understand terminology. The reasoning behind this is that people tend to find such words difficult to mentally process and so they do not pay attention to your post. Alternatively, you might want to simplify things and just write like you are talking to a second grader with the attention span of less than thirty seconds.

3. No metaphors or analogies:

Avoid using metaphors, analogies and descriptive examples in a small social space. It’s clear from our testing that it is going to be too much mental work for your average follower to get interested. And what you ought to do instead is write a single intriguing question or novelty comment in the same small space provided – of course providing a link.

4. Avoid blatant narcissism:

Avoid consistently talking about yourself or your company or brand when you micro-post. Why this would be an error is that constantly talking only about yourself looks very self serving over time. It is easy to forget this because you cannot perceive yourself very well over time. As a substitute you really want to offer helpful tool and tips to your community of followers. Track the results using your metrics tools, and make sure that the topics you are writing about are of interest to your followers.

5. Drive traffic to your own online real estate:

Avoid driving traffic to other people’s website from your twitter-sized social media spaces. You are not taking advantage of the opportunity when you always link to a third party site. Do not forget that you really want to redirect all of the traffic to your own blog or Youtube video account. Sometimes it is worth uploading non-copyrighted videos to your own Youtube account so you will have more control of the traffic.

Take care to avoid all 5 of the points mentioned and your chances of creating friends and driving leads to your site will increase substantially.

Consider life before Twitter

Or, way back before social media was a new phenomenon. How did you go about getting new business in those days? And how did you go about getting more business out of existing clients? Unless you were in, say the retail consumer goods industry, business has always been about relationships. You got more business from existing clients by socialising with them, having lunch, playing golf, going down the pub, or going to common interest functions. But whatever you did, you didn’t discuss business directly – business news maybe, politics maybe, other people, certainly and righting wrongs and sharing experiences- of course. But your business products – d’oh! Who wants to talk about that? Yet, despite no talking about business you got more of it from these people you talked with.

And, in the past, when you felt there might be a new customer, what did you do? You took every opportunity to get to know them. Instead of filling their minds with “buy this” messages you sat down with them, asked them questions about themselves. You were trying to extract as much information out of them as possible to see where you could “fit” the needs. But the encounter with potential clients was more social and the sharing of common experiences, not “sales”. Indeed, if it were focused on entirely on sales, particularly in Australia (or China or many other places) what happened? You were accused of being a “hard sell” – a pushy salesman or similar.

Fast forward to Twitter

What happens when you see a tweet that is a clearly a business conversation, when it is sales focused? Almost certainly you ignore it; you might even get angry and stop following the individual.

You will, of course, find many “social networking gurus” forcing social networking hype at you on Twitter, which makes it seem that these “experts” know a thing or two and therefore if your business uses twitter in this way, you’ll see more sales and customer loyalty. I figure not. Come back in a year and see how many of the “gurus” have changed their tune on how or why to use Twitter. Use Twitter to get your customers and prospects into a conversation about what they want, not what you want to sell them. It’s no accident that Twitter is named a ‘social network’, use it socially, in context with your business and customers will be grateful that not every communication with your business is a ‘sales’ one.

And then Twitter took off in a big way, it seemed like everyone had jumped on the Twitter band wagon, from shoe companies to celebrities to your next door neighbour. But after the first couple of months, I discovered that Twitter’s business value was negligible.

Remember Cuil’s launch? Remember Wolfram Alpha? Yeah, neither does anyone else – and Twitter may be only marginally more memorable in a couple of years. Ok, right now every blog post that offers the option to Sphinn, Digg, Like and offers the option to Retweet. Then again, remember when Alta Vista was the big kahune in the online world? I predict that in five years, Twitter will go the way of the digital watch – lots of people may have one, but, ya know…who cares.

So what happened to relegate this explosive technology to the annals of history in the future?

Functionality
It has none! I’ve never seen so many people use such nonfunctional software and get so excited about it. The amount of time that I’ve signed in and found out that Twitter is down is disproportionate to the extreme. And thus were born Tweetdeck and Seesmic and a whole slew of platforms dedicated solely to tweeting. Amazing. Something the good folks at Twitter should consider – if you really want it to take off long-term, make sure that it’s usable. Maybe some small-time high tech tycoons are using it, and maybe even some tech-savvy businessmen. And maybe some SEO geek is bantering happily with his SEO geek buddy on Twitter. (Like me.) But just try and get Warren Buffet to tweet. Just try.

Fraudulent accounts
No, I’m not talking about spam here. Do you know how long it took me to find Stephen Colbert’s real Twitter account? A long, long time. Days. And in internet speak, that’s quite a while. So why would any reputable business want to use a platform that can so easily be used to damage its reputation? That, my friends, is a double-edged sword if I ever saw one.

Spam
Ok, now I’m talking about spam. There are five gadzillion spammy Twitter accounts out there. Given that only people who follow you will see what you have to say (with the unlikely exception that your tweet gets randomly retweeted), and given that if you have enough followers to constitute a solid constituency, a good third of them will be spammers/fake accounts, then what value is Twitter really providing as a marketing platform?

Even if you did build a decent size following on Twitter, users need to be active to see your messages, and these stats may be another telling factor in why most of your followers may never even notice:

Source: informationisbeautiful.net

Unfortunately, since Twitter is all the rage lately, many small business owners get caught up in the hype, jumping in without a plan of action, actually believe that spending a lot of time “connecting” online will result in a big increase in awareness and sales. This is the problem, especially with Twitter, because it can become a thief that steals time from effective marketing practices. “Effective” meaning strategies that are known to result in sales.