Why a Google+ strategy is important to your business.

Sunday, March 2, 2014

Google+ hasn't been the most popular social network online and isn't popular with many businesses, who think it's cumbersome, ugly and not as effective as other, older social media outlets.

Well, we think it's time to take another look at and reconsider your social media optimization strategies for SEO.

Last summer, MOZ, SEO Analytic giants, ran their scientific correlation study to discover what web page qualities have a strong association with ranking highly in Google. For the first time, the Moz Data Science Team measured the correlation between Google +1s and higher rankings. The results were quite amazing.

They found that after Page Authority, a URL's number of Google +1s is more highly correlated with search rankings than any other factor. In fact, the correlation of Google +1s beat out other well known metrics including linking root domains, Facebook shares, and even keyword usage.

So, can Google+ activity actually help your pages rank higher? You bet.

Moz found that not only is the correlation for posting on Google+ higher than that for Facebook activity, but the Google+ platform has qualities that make it a far superior platform for SEO. These qualities suggest sharing content on Google+ has the potential to influence search rankings in significant ways.

Intentional or not, the engineers who made Google+ built it for SEO.

Why is it different than sharing on other social networks?
  1. Posts are crawled and indexed almost immediately
    Unlike Facebook, which hides data from Google, or Twitter, which directs Google not to follow most of its links, Google+ data is immediately and fully accessible to the company that built it.
  2. Google+ posts pass link equity
    Pages and posts on Google+ not only accumulate PageRank, but because links to posts are followed, they pass link equity on as well.
  3. Google+ is optimized for semantic relevance
    Unlike Facebook or Twitter, each post you make in Google+ has most of the characteristics of a full-blown blog posting - a unique URL, the first characters appear in the title tag and reshared posts accumlate internal links with relevant anchors. Because of these factors, each post has the potential to send strong semantic signals to Google's search algorithm.
  4. Your Google Plus posts allow you capture SERP real estate as they appear on Google search page results, thus your audience may find your Google Plus content through a standard Google search.
  5. Google Plus content stays around, gains page rank, gives page rank and appears in search results over a long period. It appears Google Plus posts can retain ranking indefinitely with some posts over a year old still top of search result pages. Compare this to the 14 minutes of life a standard tweet is estimated to have.
The bottom line is, you're losing out in terms of SEO if you are not using Google Plus effectively.  This may be the most important marketing tool you use for all of your online strategies to date!