Google+ Plays an Important Role in Marketing

Google+ was launched on June 28, 2011, as Google’s answer to social media. This was the company’s second attempt after the failure of Google Buzz.  Google+ was slow to gain popularity and many felt it would never fully pan out.

 

Now, three years later, the story is different. Roughly 25% of  internet users are active on Google making it the second largest social network in the world with over 500 million users.More importantly it makes this picture no longer accurate

As a user of social media it might be time to start taking Google+ seriously. As a business you should have set up your Google+ account yesterday. Surprised? Well the reality is Google+ maybe one of the most important social media platforms for businesses and marketers to utilize. Here are a few reasons why:

1. Google+ plays a role in SEO. Having a Google+ business page will increase your visibility on Google.  There are a few reasons why:

• Google takes 1+ (The Google+ version of a “like”) into consideration when deciding your ranking.
• Local Google Plus Pages enhances how your business appears in search results with information like hours, location, and phone number. This makes your business stand out in the results page and allows your customers to quickly and easily reach you.
• Google is starting to incorporate Google+ reviews in their search results.  This again enhances how your business appears on Google and also taps into a much more powerful force: word of mouth marketing. People are much more likely to take advice from a friend than a traditional sales pitch.
• Authorship is a newer feature that allows you to link your original content from all over the internet to your Google+ page. This further helps your content get found.
• When you make a public post using Google+ that content gets indexed by Google and could appear in search results.

This is important as Google is the number one used search engine and 97% of consumers use the site to search for local businesses. If they can’t find you on Google you probably won’t be doing business with them.

2. Circles. This enables you to fine tune who sees your content so that you can better target your message to the right audience. You can’t do that on Facebook or Twitter.

3. Full Google Integration: Google+ is becoming more and more integrated into the other Google tools and features making it easy to manage your message across all Google has to offer.

While social media can be used to foster relationships with existing and and potential customers email can lead to a much stronger connection. It is important to email only those who might be interested in your product or service though. Otherwise you end up spamming a bunch of people and turning them off to any potential business in the future. So where can you find quality emails? You guessed it Google+.  Google has announced that users of Google+ can email anyone who has a Gmail account. This means you have access to your Google+ followers who are already interested in your business.

Many critics of Google+ find Googles relentless integration of Google+ as a desperate attempt to grow the user base.

While this maybe partially true it also leads to a much better product overall. Whatever their motives with the power and influence of Google and the reasons listed above your business cannot afford to keep ignoring Google+.

SEO-The Internet And Your Place In It

In 1994 two Standford University students, Jerry Yang and David Filo, created a website to organize all their favorite web pages. It was called “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web”. At this time the web was almost organizable with only 22,000 pages.Later they would rename the site “Yahoo!” (45).

A lot has changed since then. Today there are now trillions of webpages making human organization long obsolete. So how are search engines organized now?

In a nutshell search engines crawl all the websites they can find using software called spiders. These spiders click on all the links on each page finding all the content.

Once it knows all the content it saves a summary of the site in the archive or index.When a user submits a search the engine retrieves the appropriate pages with those keyword(s).  The results are not from the whole web just the pages that search engine has archived. The results page starts with the highest quality pages that it thinks you will like the best. It tries to base this on the popularity and relevance of the pages. This is decided by many things.

1. The page is linked to lots of other web pages (Think of links as votes.)

2. Your keywords are present and how many times they are repeated (in the title, content, URL etc)

3. People spend a significant amount of time on the page

4. The linking structure of the page is good making it easy to navigate

These are just a few. Search engines use complex algorithms to figure all this out and give the pages scores. Those with the highest score appear at the top of the results page. Of course once people started to figure out how search engines worked they wanted to use that knowledge to make their page appear highest on the list. Thus Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) were born.

Typically SEO is unpaid and SEM is paid although there is overlap between the two.

Business can leverage SEO and SEM to make their web page more visible to customers. The higher the page rank of your site, the higher in the results it will be, leading to more people entering your page. This could translate into greater awareness and greater sales. This is especially important for Inbound Marketing. Customers will have a hard time finding your website or blog if it isn’t appearing in their search results. People typically only spend time at the top half,of the first page of Google as proven in this study done by Chitika.

 

This graphic should be terrifying. It more or less says if you’re not at the top you’re at the bottom. There is not much in between.

This is why SEO is so important. If your going to get traffic to your website you have to be showing up in the top of your customer’s search results.

There are tons of ways you can boost your pages page rank. Here are a few simple yet powerful ones

1. The content of your web page matters a lot. Make sure it is interesting and something people want. The better it is the longer people will stay on your page and the more likely they are to link to your page or share it via social media. Each of these things can boost your rank.

2. Links matter a lot and they are not all created equal. Spiders use links as road maps to navigate the internet. You want high quality, trusted pages to link to yours and vise-versa. This puts your page in a “good part of the neighborhood”. Search engines will put higher weight on these links. Fresh links are also higher weight so you want people to be creating new links to your page. Social media links are given less weight but are still important. These could grow in weight in the future.

3. Make sure key words are used on your page in the right places.

•  In the title as close to the beginning as possible
• In the URL
• Near the top of the page
• Throughout the content
• In the meta description tag

Also make sure you are using the right keywords. Your term for something may not be the same as your customer’s.

4. Spiders have a hard time picking the content out of Java, Flash, AJAX, videos and images. If you use these on your page make sure you have enough text context around them for the spiders to read and understand. Otherwise they may see nothing and think your page is blank. Needless to say this is not good for your ranking.

5. Spice up what your search result will look like with features like Google+, Google, Places and Google Merchant. Taking advantage of these features will enrich what your results look like with maps, sales information and peer reviews.

Sources:

Campbell, Richard, Christopher Martin, and Bettina Fabos. Media and Culture: An Introduction to Mass Communication. 9th. Boston/New York: Bedford/St. Matin’s , 2013. 45. Print.