Making Use of Your Google+ Profile – The SEO and Business Advantages

In just two years, the Google+ profile – the gateway to business – has established itself as the second largest social media site in the world, but yet so many people are still using the “we will wait and see” strategy before jumping on board. The reality is though; if you’re ignoring the craze then you’re falling behind.

Most of us are already familiar with the Google+ profile and how it has become a powerful tool to link Google-owned services such as YouTube and Blogger to the one user account. From an SEO perspective however, the benefits are significant and have been careful crafted by Google to dominate the search results and Local SEO above other social platforms – becoming an essential part of any business’s marketing strategy.

Those already with a Google+ profile may have noticed its impact already. Type your name into Google – see how well your rank in the search results? In most cases, despite probably using your Facebook and Twitter account more regularly, Google+ will rank your name higher. Although Facebook and Twitter are substantial to marketing efforts, both restrict Google from accessing their data – this limits their SEO effectiveness. Take a look at these tips to make use of your Google+ profile and optimise it for SEO and business marketing advantages.

Shared Posts and Content

Posts that are shared interacted with and +1’s are seen as important – through Google’s eyes and people searching. When others share your content with follow links, those shared posts will also contain follow links and thus, when shared multiple times your links are rapidly growing. This is why it’s essential to post popular and interesting content to increase your shares and maximise the benefits. Whilst Google+ has its privacy controls, for SEO benefits its best you make sure your content is public. Your content needs to be crawlable so ensure posts and relevant areas of your profile are all set to public.

Optimise Your Profile

The ‘about’ page provides a fantastic opportunity to include keywords and relevant do-follow links back to your website or other profiles. It’s important to have a balance of smart marketing copy that’s also SEO friendly so provide information that searchers will want to know about you or your company.

Some fundamental SEO items can also be controlled on your profile such as Meta Description and Title Tags. The SEO title for your profile is your name followed by Google+ so if you’re creative, you can incorporate your name with anything else you want to rank for. Your Meta Description is made up of your name, tagline, occupation and some of your introduction content. That’s 160 characters already being shown up in search results.

Build Your Author Rank

The thumbnail photo next to Google search results, Google Authorship is a hot topic among the marketing community and the easiest way to take advantage of the SEO benefits of Google+. The more popular and high quality articles that are associated with the author, the more web visibility all associated articles will receive – effectively building trust with not only Google, but searchers as well. The sooner you connect your Google+ authorship to a new domain, the sooner you will be indexed.

Build Your Circles

Like with any form of social media, the bigger your network the more people that will see your information. Any content shared on Google+ provides a better visibility for those in your circles and who share your interests, leading to an increase in followers.

More Freedom and Room to Breathe

Google+ gives you more room to breathe than other social media platforms with unlimited editing power. This is important when your posts go viral and you want to make changes or update information whereas Facebook will only provide limited editing abilities and Twitter will only let you delete once tweeted.

If you want to have a proper conversation, Google+ makes it easy with no character limit and threaded comments. With this extra freedom, Google+ becomes just like your own platform, giving you more control over your content.