Shane Vaughan

Certainly by now you've heard about Google's "Search Plus Your World" initiative to more completely integrate social/personal data in their search results.  You can read the official announcement from Google, made on January 10, here.  

The question I hope to answer in this blog is, "What does this mean to the local internet marketing efforts managed or executed by my national brand?"  

SPOILER ALERT:  It doesn't mean that all of your local stores/affiliates/resellers/franchisees should rush out and create a Google+ business page.  

To be fair, it also doesn't mean that your local affiliates shouldn't be engaged in Google+ either.  No, the intention of this blog post is instead to cover the implications this will have on your long-term local internet marketing strategy.  

The major impact this announcement, and the resulting changes to Google's search results, will have on your local internet marketing efforts will be from a local SEO standpoint.  Your first step is to determine if you care about local SEO.  Your knee-jerk reaction will be "Of course I care about local SEO!"  However, if you haven't yet launched co-branded local websites for all of your local stores/affiliates/resellers/franchisees, that should be your first priority.   If this is the case, then you should start with these resources: 

• The Local Web Whitepaper
• Local Websites for National Brands Whitepaper
• The Local Web - Making Your Brand Relevant Video

Assuming you already have these assets in place, then the issue of local SEO should be of significant importance to you - you naturally want traffic (especially free traffic) to these sites.  

The significance of the "Search Plus Your World" announcement is how deeply Google is integrating social search results into the SERP (search engine results page).  It's interesting to think of the progression of the big changes to the SERP: 

• First, it was just natural search
• Then, it became natural results plus paid results
• The last several years have seen the significant rise of local results
• Now Google is heavily integrating social results

For the time being, this integration is just happening with content primarily from Google+, their proprietary social network, and there has been significant backlash to Google for limiting the data to their own network.  And, the fact is, that this will change.  Google has built their brand and their product on the idea of "relevancy" and regardless of how hard they want to push Google+ as a social network, they will not let that shortsightedness impact their core brand values (at least in the long-term).  

So - what does this mean for your local websites and local internet marketing efforts?  At a basic level it means social will now have play a much more significant role in your efforts.  If it's going to play more significant role in the search results - it will impact clicks/traffic to your local sites - and hence impact revenue.  

If you haven't yet already started integrating social into all of your local marketing efforts, this should be the clear sign that it's time.  Get those Facebook/Twitter/G+ buttons onto your local websites (pointed at either the national brand's presence or the local presence).  Incent your distributed marketers to begin engaging in social, to begin caring about it.  

Ultimately - search engines are how customers find your local businesses - and we are seeing the first signs that social engagement is going to dramatically impact those search results.  It's time to get on this bus before it's too late.