Google recently announced that it reached 400 million Google+ members, as well as an impressive 100 million monthly active users in their first 12 months. The number of active users seems excessive, considering the general opinion and adoption rate I have seen, but this may be explained by a very loose definition of active users by Google.
If you are like me, you probably don’t use Google+ often, or at all and probably don’t know many people who are heavy users. Why, you may ask then, is Google+ worth talking about for brands if people aren’t really using it….Increase natural search ranking for your Web site.
Posting important Web pages from your site isn’t going to instantly boost your page rankings, or immediately push your Google+ post to the first page for everyone, it will have a drastic result on anyone who has Circled you on Google+
The Experiment: Follow an active brand on Google+ (Williams-Sonoma), and search relevant keywords that they have posted about to see if any of their content is pushed up in the rankings because they are now in my network.
The post I selected to use as the basis of this keyword and image search was from November 10th – and featured a discount of a particular brand of turkey, Willie Bird, that had an image and outbound link.
After Circling Williams-Sonoma, I went to Google and Google Images and did a search for “Willie Bird Turkeys” on both – with impressive results.
Google Search Results: Not only did the Google+ post featured earlier come on up the first page, it came up 7th overall in the natural search results, and was the third highest result not from the WilleBird.com domain. As you can see from the image below, there is a small grey image of a man next to the results, this indicates that results came from my personal network, proving that following Williams-Sonoma will give me more results from their networks.
Google Image Search Results: I expected that the results would be even better for Williams-Sonoma because Google has put a large emphasis on photo search-ability in Google+, but what I found was much more personalized than the general search. The first three images to appear in the results were from Williams-Sonoma; one from the Google+ post, one from their blog, and one from their Facebook. The appearance of “Williams-Sonoma” on the images signifies coming from my personal network, much like the grey man from general search results. What is unique about the image results especially though, is that not only did it pull an image from Google+, but Williams-Sonoma’s other networks too, most likely because they had connected them from Google+.
Takeaways: Promote your brand’s Google+ on your Web site, Facebook, Twitter, email and anywhere else possible. The more followers you get, the more you can market to them, not just through Google+, but Google search results as well.
When creating a Google+ content strategy, remember that a big part of it should be tailored to searchable keywords around your brand. Don’t let this block out ALL other content that would be interesting to followers, but using a consistent keyword strategy will help your brand get found on Google.
