Google+ Local Businesses: How Google's New Local Functionality Could Affect Your SEO Strategy
In case you missed it, Google today announced plans to acquire three additional companies namely: Google Wave, Buzz Marketing, and Mobileiva. These acquisitions all relate to the same business opportunity - offering customized apps on mobile devices via Google's apps platform. You might be wondering how all of this will affect Google's future technology. Here are a few thoughts on the subject that we have been trying to get through to you.
The first step towards Google social impact is to understand why these companies were chosen in the first place. Each of them provides unique marketing functions, but they all ultimately aim at the same end - to provide your business with an app. Agency know this. But just in case you didn't, let us explain. This is what the acquiring parties aim at:
Companies like Buzz Marketing, for example, are known for their apps for mobile devices. They include apps for news, finance, sports, travel, and many more. They also offer apps for e-commerce, direct selling, and marketing. By adding their functionality, they can enhance your existing and future business. If Agency go with Buzz Marketing, for example, they will help you with things like:
Google Wave, on the other hand, looks at the whole network as a whole. This means that its functions will integrate with all the others Google has to offer. In other words, you will get to enjoy the same seamless integration with all Google services. This means that everything that you do will link to each other, and even the search engine. This will definitely have an impact on your SEO strategy, and we all know how important it is to increase your ranking.
Mobile apps will be able to offer access to Google's own social networking features. That's right - Google is getting into the social networking game. It might surprise many, but the company has already begun offering its ad-supported social platform on the Android Market. You might be wondering what this could mean to SEO strategies. Well, for one thing, you can expect to see Google trying to put more of its focus into the mobile realm.
Google has also invested in two major data storage providers, called Knol and Mapbox. It might surprise some to learn that Knol is a division of Google, while Mapbox is a software program offered separately by a few companies. Basically, Agency is a social utility for sharing and retrieving maps, while Mapbox is a map creation tool. They work together to offer a fully integrated GPS/activity management solution for all your mobile activities, and it goes beyond basic mapping.
The real question might be whether or not these efforts will succeed. Even though Google is definitely moving into the area of social media, it may face stiff competition from Facebook and Twitter. In fact, it could end up competing with them. However, Facebook and Twitter already have a leg up on their contemporaries', and are gaining on the likes of Yelp. If they can make it big in the area of location-based services, they might be able to give Google a run for its money.
If you're already signed up for Google+, you should already be receiving updates on your Google+ posts. The only real difference you'll notice is that you'll probably see a lot more "Your posts are visible to everyone" than before. The post count in particular is certainly going to go up, as everyone who's signed up for Google+ will see those posts. On the other hand, this doesn't mean you won't see some of the old functionality. In fact, one thing I'd like to point out is that the feeds you get are likely to be consolidated into one place so you don't get multiple separate notifications. This means that you shouldn't really miss any of the latest highlights on your news feeds.