Google Launches A More Social Search

A battle is happening in the Silicon Valley. Two software giants, Google and Facebook, are competing to be the leader of search in the coming years. Facebook won't give Google access to its social graph data. In response, the search engine giant is working with just about every other social network in an effort to make Google search social.

Yesterday Google launched an upgrade to its search engine, adding social results for users signed in with their Google accounts. In addition to traditional website search results, searchers will start seeing results from their friends on Twitter, Blogger, Flickr, LinkedIn, etc.

For a full understanding of these new changes, check out this new video explaining social search improvements from Google.

Rank Doesn't Matter; Reach Matters

With this latest update from Google, rank officially died as a metric for businesses to obsess over. It now doesn't matter if you rank in the top slot for a certain keyword, because Google is quickly scaling personalized and social search. This means that everyone who searches will see a different page of results, based on their location, search history and their connections accross the social web.

At HubSpot, we have been advocating for a while now that businesses need to become active on social media, not only for the benefits that come from building reach and engagement on individual platforms, but also for the benefits these connections would provide in the evolution of search. This evolution has now arrived and part of getting traffic from search engines is now distributing great content through social media channels and building your reach on each network. Going forward, the number of connections you have on social networks, will directly impact the number of people you may be able to reach through Google search results.

Marketing Takeaway

Stop obsessing over rank and keyword stuffing. Instead, focus your time and effort on creating amazing blog content and distributing it through social media. Develop strategies and prioritize engagement on each social platform to help build reach that brings organic search traffic to your website.

Show this video from Google to others in your organization and help them understand that the process for getting found online is evolving and that social media activity is going to be an important part of online marketing growth moving forward.

What do you think about these new changes to Google?