In the past, I usually have been very cautious in my reaction to Google’s new products and how SEO & Web Marketing would change because of them. I know I am not alone in these beliefs as I was not alone in seeing Google Buzz and Google Sidewiki were heading straight to the dead pool. Things changed, however, when it came to Google+. I was impressed from the start, nevertheless, I was nervous it would not make it in the crowded social network market. Even as some called Google+ “the fastest growing social network ever”, it was mostly growth driven by early adopters, but shortly this will change.  This is the year of Google+.  You will not be able to escape Google+, because it’s about to be on every site you can think of (if not already). More importantly, if you are a business selling goods or services and to this point you have ignored social networks, do not miss this one. Trust me, if you decide to ignore Google+, I fear you might be left asking what happened to your Google traffic by this same time next year.

How can I be so certain? Is this just hype? Simple stated: No. This past week, Google changed SEO and marketing as we know it. I know it sounds over dramatic, but Google Search Plus Your World really is a game changer. Why you ask? Simply put, Google+ is now baked into the most popular search engine in the world. Google has market share over 70% in most countries and in others (such as Canada) as high as 90% (source: StatCounter).Google Search Plus Your World will include Google+ data in your Google searches and it personalizes your results by including Google+ profiles, business pages, posts, and all the data from you network. This only applies if you are signed with a Google Account (for most of it), but with 400 Million Google Accounts, that is a huge number. And if you think Google is not going to use this data to refine it’s normal search algorithm, you’re dreaming. The point is, Google, has finally cracked a way to get human interaction into the quality aspect like never before.

Imagine for example, you +1 your favorite Pizza restaurant. The next day your buddy looks for Pizza in Google, and your recommendation shows up. He decides to go there and +1’s that result. Now your network and his will see this page as more relevant in searches for Pizza than the Google “old” algorithm would have made it. Sure the SEO basics will matter, but social signals will become even more important. A business that is not on Google+ can still get a click of the +1 button, but having a Google+ Business page will allow a business to interact with their Circle. This is why you will start to see Google+ promoted everywhere.

What will also help it’s growth is Google+ pages will now show up, when a brand is searched (assuming a page is set up correctly). Want to see it in action? Do a search for website such as the New York Times and you will see their Google+ account right below it. Google+ data will also be used to show suggested users and content, based on social signals even if you have no account. Do a quick search for “marketing”, and you see suggested users on Google+, even if you are not signed in. Notice it also says: “Learn how you could appear here too”. Click the page and you are told “The more quality content you create and the more people that engage with you, the more prominent your profile will become.” Brands do not show in these suggestions (yet), but we can certainly see personal brands will become even more important.

As a business owner what does this all mean? It means being visible personally in Google+ can help your company be more visible. It will also be important to get a Google+ page going. More importantly, you need to start thinking about the right kind of content to create and to share. For SEO and Marketing people, Google+ opens a new frontier, where the traditional ways of getting notice in Google search has changed. So what are the next steps.

Here is a three step action plan:

• Get a Google+ Page and Connect it to your website
• Promote Google+ on your website
• Creating compelling content for Google+

Connect:

First you need to create your Google+ page. Second, you connect your website to your Google+ page using the Google+ badge configuration tool. Third, use Google+ Direct Connect . This will allow visitors to find your Google+ page and add it to their Circles, directly from Google search results. Lastly check you have it working properly with Google’s Rich Snippet tool.

Promote:
Make sure if you have a blog, you add a +1 button. If you have en email that goes out make sure users can join your page. Have products for sales on your website? Add a +1 button to every product page.

Great Content:
We saved the best for last, because without this all else fails. When posting to Google+ you need to use content that gives users a reason to share and to engage. Great content is emotional content. It makes people react. It can be videos, in-depth study of topics, latest news. Regardless of the content, though it needs to be written to/for people not at people. If you are posting a press releases or links to articles you need to make sure it’s offered in an “emotional” way and engages the audience. In the end, you need to ensure Social Media does not feel like a chore, because it will show in your communications. You should try to come across as genuine and in a “relaxed” voice. The ultimate goal is about getting people to share your content and grow the circles of influence your brand has.

Bonus Tip: Google+ Hangouts allows you to hold a web chat with 10 people at a time and share your screen. It’s a great way to add a more human side to your business. With webcams coming standard in most laptops and in the iPad, it’s a great way to connect with your customers in an informal way.

So there you have it. It’s time for you to take action and get going with Google+. It’s much easier to be first and make mistakes, then to play catch up with your competition. Google+ is a game changer for business, for SEO and for web marketing practices  as we know it.  Now is the time to take the plunge into the world of social media, if you haven’t, because 2012 is the year of Google+.

If you need more in-depth information about Google+, with a lot more details, I highly recommend you read Mashable’s Google+ cheat sheet. It is very helpful and covers all aspects of Google+.

As you know, I mentioned recently I would write  more on analytics. For the most part, I focus on Google Analytics because  I know for many of you, it’s the easiest (ahem cheapest) way to get analytics. Nevertheless, Google is no slouch. They are really bringing the A game to table. Most importantly, they are making things easier for the average user and small business owner/webmaster. The newest development I have seen is the way the are making it changes without requiring massive code changes to get tracking data. In the past couple of weeks, we have seen them add numerous features to Google Analytics latest version, that improve the data availability, and require little if no coding changes. We can now add another one to the list. The latest announcement from Google this past week was finally making the “Social” tab in the new version of Google Analytics a little easier to use (you can see where you can find it in the image).
I’ll be honest, prior to this announcement, I was actually almost totally ignoring this data. I had no choice, though, as the only data coming in was for Google+. And while I love Google+, not many users seem to really use it (yet). Furthermore, to track a Tweet or a Like was an exercise in figuring out the code, that was not as simple as a couple of lines. Personally, I had better things then to figure it out, as social media data was a “nice to have”, but not a “must have”. I think like  most people, the focus is on selling widgets, then trying to customize code. This does not change even if Google Analytics is free. Thankfully, though, Google Analytics has made an upgrade that makes the need for massive code customization  a thing of the past if you use ShareThis (like we do–at the bottom of this post), AddThis or AddtoAny. All three services have made themselves work automatically, or with small tweaks with the Google Analytics Social tabs in the new Google Analytics (the image to the left can show you where you can find it). I’m not really here to tell you which service is the best, as I have used all three. Each has its on benefits and downsides, and I am using each of them in different projects. Rather I wanted to highlight this change and that this should give you another reason to use the new Google Analytics. If you have any of these three Social Sharing site/capabilities on your site, now is a perfect time to enable gathering data from them. It also now makes more sense to spend some time looking at this tab for insights as well. Furthermore, now that there is the Multi-Channel funnel reports in the Google Analytics, you can really get some depth quickly on how social activity is helping your business/traffic where it may have been invisible. I really hope the team at Google continues to integrate with third parties in this way.

Have you started to see in your Google Analytics: “Keyword Not Provided” and wondered what it’s all about? In case you missed it, a couple of weeks ago Google’s Search team announced that it was making a change in how the data from it’s search results was shared. In short, they stated:

“As search becomes an increasingly customized experience, we recognize the growing importance of protecting the personalized search results we deliver. As a result, we’re enhancing our default search experience for signed-in users….What does this mean for sites that receive clicks from Google search results? When you search from https://www.google.com, websites you visit from our organic search listings will still know that you came from Google, but won’t receive information about each individual query.”

Now to put this in plain English, basically this is how it will work: If someone is signed into Gmail, or any other Google Service, and they do a search and land on your site, you will not know what keyword they searched. There will be execetpitons to this, as the Google Analytics team was quick to point out in their own announcement :

“To help you better identify the signed in user organic search visits, we created the token “(not provided)” within Organic Search Traffic Keyword reporting. You will continue to see referrals without any change; only the queries for signed in user visits will be affected. Note that “cpc” paid search data is not affected.”

In other words, users who click on Adwords, are not safe from having their keyword data shared. I’m not going to point out the contradictions on this, as many have done so already. Avinash (Google Analytics Evangelist) also has some interesting comments on this change. Another thing to note, is this is not something that only affects Google Analytics, but all analytics vendors. For this reason, Webtrends and Omniture, for example, have release statements on how they will deal with this change. As the change gets rolled out worldwide, you will start to see an increasing number of “Keyword Not Provided”, so you will need to become more creative. I would straongly recommend if you have not already to get a Google Webmaster Account, as Google notes: You “can also receive an aggregated list of the top 1,000 search queries that drove traffic to their site for each of the past 30 days through Google Webmaster Tools (GWT). This information helps webmasters keep more accurate statistics about their user traffic”. I should add a note of caution, Matt Cutts, Search Quality Engineer from Google who adds this caveat: “ Google’s webmaster tools only provide a sampling of the data… the data in our webmaster console is [not] equivalent to the data that websites can currently find in their server logs, because that’s not the case”.  To me, the tool that will become even more powerful is Google Insights for Search ,because going forward, you will have to rely on more universal (Google search) data than on personal (site specific) data. The effect of this change will affect each region, website or vertical differently.  In my view, although it may take more time,  if you focus on content data, trends with keywords (as opposed to exact data) and other tools available, the impact will be somewhat lessened. The reality is, there is no point in crying over split milk, it’s done. Now it’s time to come up with creative solutions to keep moving forward.

If you’re a business with a physical location, even if you have a website, we highly recommended you create an entry in the local business listings of Google and Bing. In the past we spoke at length about Google Local (now place pages) and Yellow Pages tool as well. I’d like to take a moment to highlight the tool in Bing. While Bing sometimes gets forgotten, it’s important to note, for many people, it’s their default search engine. As well, Bing Business Portal is free, so why wouldn’t you want to take advantage of an opportunity to tell more potential customers about your business? The most beautiful thing about Bing Business Portal is the that owners of businesses can create deals and promote the offers on both the Bing desktop and mobile experience – for free.

To get started it’s relatively easy too, and it only takes a couple of steps. First you need to head over Bing’s Business Portal, to claim your business listing on Bing. You can do this by phone or by mail. This is to ensure you actually own the business you are trying to claim.

The next step, after you claim your business is to enhance your listing. You can add details such as: photos, a logo, parking availability, languages spoken, holiday hours, payment types accepted, and select categories for your business to appear in. You can even add links to your Website, Facebook page, and Twitter URL. What’s really awesome is if you are an restaurant or bar, Bing makes it to include menus. You can either create one in the Bing Business Portal or by provide a direct link to an existing menu. You can also create a mobile menu that consumers can view on their mobile devices.

The final step, is your ability to create deals or offers. You can easily create a discount coupon, promotion or rebate for your business using Bing’s Deal Editor. All you need to do is specify an offer category, a type (dollar amount, dollars off, percentage off, etc.), add information describing the offer (photos, expiration, disclaimer, etc.), and than you can promote the offer on anywhere on the web you need, for free. Also being that it is integrated with Bing, your deal will be highlighted on Bing desktop search results for buisenesses, as well as the deal tab from the Bing for Mobile homepage. Best of all, because of Bing’s integration with Facebook, once you have created your deals, you can publish them to your existing business page on Facebook.

Remeber, when you create your listing to put your SEO hat on all the information you write, from the text in your deals, to the menu items, to your business description are all used to improve the relevance of your listing on Bing. Make sure you balance accuracy, clarity and readibilty, with being descriptive of what you have and what your business does. I recommend you look at how your competitors rank on those words that matter most to you attract customers. Also do not be complacent, by setting and forgetting. On a monthly basis you should review your listing, see how you are ranking, what others are doing, and tweak your listing so you can test what works best. Remember, search engines are the new Yellow Pages Book, so how you look is really important.

Should you have more questions, you should check out the FAQ for Bing Business Portal.

One of the reasons, I thought it make sense to bulk up the coverage of Google Analytics, it that they are really stepping up their game and slowly making it really hard to find holes in their offering –or reasons to go with any other vendor. The fact they added real-time is a shot against the bow for companies such as GetClicky or ChartBeat. While not as fully functional as these (yet), as Google continues to grow their premium option, I think it would not be unheard of them to expand this more robustly.

To me, though, as a e-commerce marketer, the real big news came last week with a seminar giving us more details about Multi-Channel Reporting. Now, you might say so what? But trust me, it’s really huge news for anyone using multi-channel marketing. Up to the release of this report, no Google Analytics user had insight to what their muliple channels were doing for them. Why you ask? Because Google used to collect data on the last referrer. So in this sense imagine that you had a campaign that was created by your email marketing person. It gets sent out to your customers, and then some customers click around, and then leave you site. A week later they click a banner, on an affiliate site, come back and make a purchase. Great for your company, bad for your email marketing person. They lose out on getting any credit. Not anymore, though! Even more exciting is now you can see the direct effect your Twitter or Facebook marketing has. Do people read tweets or like something, come to your site, and then somehow come back 10 days later directly to buy? Now you will have some better insight.

The new Multi-Channel report, can be found in the new Beta Google Analytics, which is truly becoming an amazing platform of growth. To get to it, log in to your your Google Analytics Account, then Profile, and make sure you select “New Version” at the top. The Multi-Channel report, will be in the standard reporting tab, under conversions.

To use the Multi-Channel Funnel report you need to have a funnel tracking goals. Below is a video explaining the new report

Also here is the seminar given last week with much more details in how to use it:

If you prefer to read, check out Multi-Channel Funnels pages at Google Analytics support page.

To me, the most exciting aspect of all is that these releases just keep coming. The new design of Google Analytics is simply awesome, real-time stats was a great bonus and now multi-channel funnel reports gives us a way to measure multi-marketing campaigns more effectively. For any business, especially one with a limited budget, the tools Google is offering (especially for free) are simply amazing. The goal is now for business to realize the power of Analytics and to use them effectively to get huge ROI from the insights.