Search Marketing News

Google announced today the launch of Google+ Pages for businesses and brands. The new profiles, available to everyone in just two days, will allow customers to like (er, +1) the brand, add it to their Circles to stay informed on updates, and engage with the company on its Google+ page.

Sounds a lot like a Facebook fan page, right?

Except Facebook doesn’t have a search marketing empire to leverage behind its business offerings. Just two weeks after eliminating the “+” operator from searches for supposed usability reasons, Google announced that signing up for a Google+ Page will also hook businesses into Direct Connect. This new search feature lets users to skip right on over to a brand’s profile page by typing +[BRAND NAME] into the Google search engine.

And the search engine implications go further than that. According to the Inside Adwords blog, Google+ Pages will be linked to Adwords accounds. +1s for pages, brands, ads and more will all get “tallied together” and the total will be highlighted in organic and paid search results.

Looks to us like a new era of social search marketing. As AdAge points out, “If Google+ achieves enough scale, and if ads with +1’s garner higher CTRs as expected, then Google+ powered ads will wind up as the most successful form of social advertising online.”

Lesson to businesses? Hop on the Google+ train — and make some friends.

 

REFERENCE:

Google+ Pages: connect with all the things you care about
by Vic Gondrota
November 7, 2011
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/google-pages-connect-with-all-things.html