B2B marketing companies that use SEO strategies to gain traffic may need to switch their focus to social media in lieu of Google's recent search results modification.

Google's Search plus Your World integrates Google Plus into search results, allowing people to "search against both the broader web and (your) own Google Plus social graph," Mashable reports.

What this means is, packing headlines and stories full of keywords will have a greatly reduced impact. If a client is signed into Google's social network and does a search for a topic, the top few links will likely be a mix of both traditional and social results.

This affects B2B companies, according to Poynter, because now social media optimization is more important than ever to spread content and gain referrals.

Google is also hoping to add Twitter and Facebook into the mix as well, further diluting traditional SEO-based results in favor of social sharing.

According to a May 2011 study from iTracks, 89 percent of U.S. B2B companies were using social media marketing. That other 11 percent? They risk being left in the dust. 

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