Dead? No. Evolving? You betcha.
Last week 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.
Where’s Facebook? Facebook won’t give access to its social data as they want to compete with Google to be the leader of search in the coming years. Because of this, Google has tried to work with just about every other social platform to make the search more social.
For a better understanding of these changes, check out this video from Google:
With this new take on search, rank is officially dead as a metric for companies to obsess over. It doesn’t matter if you rank high for a certain keyword — Google is scaling personalized/social search.
What Does This Mean?
It means that everyone who searches on Google will see a different set of results, based location, search history and connections across major social media platforms.
It also means that companies need to be more active on social media. The number of connections you have on different social media platforms now directly correlates to the number of people you can possibly reach through Google search results.
What Should You Do?
Stop worrying about whether or not you have enough relevent keywords crammed into each page on your Website. Instead, focus your energy on creating rock solid content, and dispersing it through the different social media channels.
What do you think about Google’s new search?
