You Need to Stop Ignoring Google+ - Here are 4 SEO Reasons Why

In the two years since its launch, it is no secret that Google+ has had its skeptics—myself included.

However, it might be time to reconsider such hasty judgments. Recent data shows it has leap-frogged YouTube and Twitter as the second largest social network.

Personally, I was never very familiar with what is now the world’s second largest social network. I had a page by default through my Gmail account, but never took the time to actually complete my profile. I always considered it to be just an attempt by Google to jump on the social media bandwagon—providing us with yet another burdensome social platform to maintain while failing to stand out among the giants that had such a firm hold on the social media market.

Eventually, I caved and decided to complete my own Google+ profile as well as do some investigative research to see what all of the buzz was about.

Through my probing, I found several advantages and features unique to Google+ that content creators can take advantage of. Many of these features, such as the +1, Hangouts, and Communities are old news...but what really caught my attention were the SEO benefits that an active and completed profile can have for your online content.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt had this to say on the matter:

“Information tied to online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification…The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.”

There is little question that Google is the perennial leader in the world’s search engine game, and irrelevance in the eyes of its crawlers could quickly put a damper on your online marketing efforts. If your content is not showing up in Google’s search results, there is little chance that your website will get the traffic that you are looking for. This could spell disaster for any publisher, blogger, or brand hoping to compete online.

So to help you avoid any looming disaster strike on your marketing efforts, here are four ways that an active and completed Google+ profile can improve your SEO:

1. Establish your author-ity.

Have you Google’d anything recently? If so, you have probably seen people’s faces appearing next to some of the search results—behold the power of Google Authorship! Google is now adding more weight to things such as the Authorship tag and Author Rank in its search rankings. In order to take advantage of this great benefit, and potentially increase your click-through rate by up to 150%, you should implement the Authorship tag immediately.

As an example, here’s what it looked like after setting up my authorship through the email verification method:



I’m thinking a more complete Google+ profile, along with more authored content, would help my content rank even higher on Google’s search engine results page (SERP).

2. Get by with a little help from your friends.

How active are you at giving social signals? A social signal could be a retweet on Twitter, a “like” on your Facebook page, or the sharing of a post. In the case of Google+, the most recognizable one is the +1 feature.

Social signals are now going to hold more relevance in Google’s algorithm for determining quality content. Therefore, don’t just have a Google+ profile. Be active in using it to share and link to great content.

Some ways to use Google+ to increase the number of social signals for your content include adding the Google+ One Button to all of your work, creating a Google+ Brand Page in addition to personal profiles, and encouraging recommendations and reviews of your content or brand page.

3. Scratch my back (link), and I’ll scratch yours.

The third SEO benefit of Google+ for content creators comes in the form of what is still one of the top SEO strategies in today’s dynamic SEO landscape: more high quality, natural back links to your content.

A complete Google+ profile offers a great opportunity to get the back links to your site from high-authority sources that will directly influence your page ranking. Inbound links in your Google+ posts will also help drive traffic to your online content. The activity on your Google+ profile is one of the ways that Google determines the value of these links, so creating great content that others will want to link to and sharing links to your own content are essential if you hope to leverage your page to help you rank higher on Google’s SERP.

4. Look for more SEO real estate.

Google now has the option of creating a Google+ Brand page for your business.

When completed and used actively, a company’s brand page appears alongside any related search results, essentially acting as free SEO territory for your brand or business. A brand can also link to their own corporate blog or social media accounts in the Links section and include top keywords in the About section. Google will look at all of these factors when determining search rankings.

It’s safe to assume that Google is slightly biased toward its own social platform when determining search engine rankings.

Have you completed your Google+ page yet?