Understanding Google’s ‘Search plus Your World’ Tool

Back in November, we told you about Google’s latest personalized search features and how you could use these social integrations in traditional search engine results pages (SERPs) to build your audience and drive additional traffic to your site. Since then, Google has dramatically expanded the reach of its personalized search results with the launch of Search plus Your World, which adds Google+ pages, posts, and pictures to search results. Let’s take a closer look at Search plus Your World — and whether it changes the marketing recommendations we made in our previous post.

According to Google, “Search has always brought you information from across the web. Now, search gets better by including photos, posts, and more from you and your friends. When signed in with Google+, you’ll find personal results and profiles of people you know or follow. You can even expand your world by discovering people related to your search.”

The new tool essentially displays results in three ways:

• In your recommended results — If you enter the name of someone who has a profile on the Google+ social-networking site into Google’s search bar, a link to that person’s profile will appear as part of your recommended results. Here, blogger Corbett Barr’s Google+ profile appears if you search his name in Google:
  
• As an enhanced search result — Entering certain queries into Google will turn up “personal results,” which appear above the traditional top 10 results. Click on the Personal Results link to pull up any images, places, posts, or articles tagged by contacts in your Google+ circles that relate specifically to your search term.

• As a recommended related person or page — When you type specific phrases into Google, people or pages that the search engine deems to be related (according to the information shared inside Google+) may display to the right-hand side of the traditional search results, as seen with the generic query for “music” below:

As a website owner, each of these possibilities should be intriguing to you. For example, say you’re trying to break into a competitive SERP, such as the one that appears for the keywords “lose weight” or “make money online.” You could spend years — and thousands of dollars — trying to get your site to creep up the traditional rankings. Or you could simply ask a prospect to include you as in their circles on Google+, which could be enough to get your site recognized right away.

Obviously, there are some limitations to Search plus Your World. In order to have any of these personalized results appear, your readers need to have and be signed in to their Google+ profiles, which aren’t nearly universal at this time. And, even if your customers are on Google+, you’ll need them to add you to their circles in order to have your content appear as a personalized result in most cases.

However, there’s no doubt that a system that gives you this many opportunities to break into the traditional SERPs has potential. To get the most out of Search plus Your World, follow these steps:

Step 1: Build and maintain an active presence on Google+.

Yes, it’s frustrating to have yet another social-networking site on which you’re expected to maintain a public profile for your business. However, given the tremendous potential of content shared on Google+ to find its way into the traditional SERPs, we believe that this one is worth the extra effort.

Fortunately, setting up a profile on Google+ is easy, although you are currently unable to build profiles under your business name (Google recently changed its sign-up process to include the manual review of established pseudonym accounts). To sign up, simply log on to plus.google.com with your Google account. Once you’re in, you’ll be able to add people to your social circles and fill out profile information that will help Google associate you with specific search queries.

That said, don’t just set up your profile and stop in once a month. The people who stand to benefit the most from Search plus Your World are those with the largest networks of followers. To attract these followers, you need to post authoritative content to your profile regularly, so that you’ll be recognized as an expert in your field and, thus, worthy of following.

Step 2: Encourage people to follow you on Google+.

Beyond posting regularly to your Google+ profile, encourage readers on your website to follow you on the social network. A few of the places you’ll want to consider doing this:

• At the end of every blog post (potentially through the use of a social sharing tool)
• On your “About Me” page
• In your profiles on other social-networking sites
• In any email marketing communications
• On any mobile marketing tools you use

Again, the people with the largest social networks on Google+ and the highest perceived authority in the eyes of Google (as based on profile activity and recognition) stand the greatest chance of being recognized as a “personal result” or “related page” on Google search results pages.

Step 3: Follow Google’s established procedures to increase your chances of getting noticed.

Google offers a number of ways you can communicate directly with the search engine to tell Google where you feel your content should be shared. For example, in order to appear as a “related page,” Google allows you to set up a Google+ page and tag it with relevant keywords and search phrases. Then, as you become more active with Google+ by posting about your tagged keywords and sharing relevant content, you’ll increase the odds of Google sharing your page as a related option in the SERPs.Going through all of the effort to build, maintain, and promote a Google+ profile may seem like a lot of extra work, but taking the time to do so could result in some major benefits in terms of how visible you and your website are in the natural SERPs.

According to P.J. Fusco in Search Engine Watch, “Google search has historically been about finding the best results for the many. Google Search plus Your World is about finding the best results for you. Now, ‘you’ are the enterprise. That is to say, each individual [who] uses Google+ represents a new opportunity to have digital content produced by or about your enterprise discovered and shared among immeasurable circles of friends.”

Think of the work involved in building your Google+ following as an opportunity to be seen more frequently in the SERPs, and you’ll quickly see why these efforts could be as important as traditional SEO in 2012 and the future of personalized search.

Image: meaneame comunicacions