Google+ Plus – Necessary Part of Your SEO Strategy

Facebook Likes an Twitter Tweets and Retweets are important for SEO. However the most important social tool for SEO at the moment is Google+. Google is pushing all Gmail users and Google account holders to utilize the service.

Google Plus

Google Plus

Google’s primary goal has always been to deliver relevant results. Relevance used to be more global in nature – the idea that someone who searches for “bananas” is looking for the most relevant website for bananas on the web. This still carries a lot of weight, however relevance has shifted from what’s relevant globally, to what’s relevant on a more personal level to the person conducting the search. For example, a graphic designer searching for pink is probably looking for pink color swatches, while a teenager is probably looking for music and images about the popular singer, Pink and on the day before Mrs. Brown’s birthday, Mr. Brown is probably looking for something from the Victoria’s Secret line, Pink.

To help shape personal results, Google modifies the results pages it delivers according to your personal preferences, pages that you have +1’d and pages that other people in your social circle like. So what does this mean in terms of how Consorte Marketing will leverage Google+ to grow traffic to your website?

Our goals for Google+ are as follows:

  1. Drive users to “plus” pages from your website. This means that we may suggest design changes to shift more focus to this button, or to add a G+ button if it doesn’t currently exist on your website. Generally, we’ll look for pages that users are more apt to share with others. For example, people are more likely to share a recipe that uses bananas as an ingredient, than to share a page that talks about the history of the banana.
  2. We will develop and optimize a Google+ business profile for your company. We know, we know… there are so many social networks out there it’s hard to keep up. You probably already have pages on LinkedIn and Facebook. What could another page possibly do for you? Well, the answer is common sense really. If we’re performing SEO on your website for the purposes of increasing your rank on Google, then it stands to reason that when Google wants to promote a new way to get more of that traffic, you can only gain by climbing on board the Googlewagon.
  3. We will drive users to add your business profile to their “circles” on the Googlesphere.

As these goals are achieved, users who share pages will have a direct impact on the results that their connections see when performing their own Google searches.

Of course, driving users to Tweet (Twitter) and Like (Facebook) pages will still have a direct impact on traffic and rankings and should be part of an effective Social Media strategy, but if you must pick one, pick Google+.

  • By Dennis Consorte
  • Published on March 28th, 2012
  • Posted in SEO, Social Media.