By now, all search engine optimization specialists are aware of how Google dominates not only the search engine industry but the social media as well. Now that Google’s own social media agency Google+ is nearing its 100th million user, a huge bump from having only 40 million users from October of last year, suffice it to say that marketers and search engine optimization companies can easily leverage the social networking site to boost their Internet rankings and organic search results – the white hat way of doing SEO of course.
From Brian Whalley of HubSpot Blog, here are five ways for a search engine optimization company to use Google+ to their advantage:
- Having a +1 Button on your website can easily work to your advantage because if you haven’t noticed, +1 shares now show up on search engine results pages. This means that it can directly affect your search rankings because it is one factor that Google use to rank your page for different phrases. This is especially helpful for blog posts and landing pages. HubSpot reports that having a +1 button is 3.5 times more effective than pages without it.
- Both business pages and personal profiles can have their status updates included in Google’s search engine results pages, if they are relevant enough. To optimize it, mention keywords in your status updates that you want to rank for because this is another opportunity that you should take advantage of
- The Google + Author Tag is one of the unique aspects of Google’s social networking site. For a search engine optimization company, the best way to maximize this feature is to include author names, links, images, and other necessary information to establish authorship. Doing this will help your profile, and hopefully your business page, stand out against the competition.
- Aside from Google+’s own search engine, a search engine optimization specialist can now include regular search results from their own Google+ pages. This option is called the “Search plus Your World” wherein personal results and organic results appear when users search for a particular keyword. What it means for an Internet marketing expert is that content now has a longer lifespan and shared content can also help your page rank higher if you have a large Google+ following.
- In line with this, a search engine optimization company should always have a regularly updated Google+ profile because it has the potential to show in the top right corner of the search results for pages or people closely associated with a particular brand. The updates should always be keyword-optimized for better leverage.
Businesses today are wise enough to understand the power that Google+ has over search engine results. There are many integrations and features exclusive to Google+ that a search engine optimization company should take advantage of and these are just a few of those.