photo by Shawn Collins
At White Label SEO Outsourcing we have been monitoring the Google Plus Social Media platform’s value in general and for SEO since its launch, we feel if it is worth doing it is worth doing well but haven’t been convinced that it is worth doing at all yet. The inclusion of Google Plus results though in Google’s Search Plus Your World search personalization feature though may change this: though how much isn’t quite clear.
When I signed up for Google Plus it was tough to find many people I knew, except other SEO experts, and even in desperation looking for bands and brands to add to my circles there were few who had made the leap: in part because of the delay in Google offering brand pages. Now though Google seem to be trying to force brands to set up pages and get on to Google plus with the changes they are making to search.
For those of you with a personal Facebook page that has a few details and photos added, perhaps by others, that don’t fit with the professional profile you want Google’s new Your World search could be ideal as you can now start with a fresh Google plus page that will not only come up ahead of Facebook but also almost any other result. This also means that as a brand you could find that a Google plus post about your bad customer service may start coming up before your homepage and this may force you to set up a brand page to ensure that it comes as the top result.
For those of us working in SEO Social Media has for some time been coming closer and closer to home to the point where it is almost a part of SEO with no follow links from Twitter, Facebook and others probably worth more than we realised in the past; we may now need to really make sure that Google Plus results are optimised with landing pages, or posts and keywords included as much as on other websites. We may need to start treating Google’s Your World search almost like a separate search engine in fact and a Google Plus page as a separate website optimized just as well as a client’s main website so those using Your World search find a client’s Google Plus page rather than that of a competitor we thought we had already vanquished through the main Google results.
So will White Label SEO Outsourcing be setting up a page on Google Plus? Not yet, I have a personal page and so we are monitoring Google Plus and Google Your World through that but despite what different people may say it isn’t clear just how much of an effect it will have, when consumers start signing up en masse to Google Plus we will know.
I think you hit the nail on the head when you said “Now though Google seem to be trying to force brands to set up pages and get on to Google plus with the changes they are making to search.” The operative word here is “force”. It seems that the new SPYW results that Google is serving up in it’s prime real estate spot (normally reserved for advertising), quality and relevancy no longer matter. Google + accounts matter now regardless of the quality of the G+ account. When doing any search, wouldn’t you want the best, most relevant results related to your query rather than seeing G+ accounts dominating results? For example, hundreds of people on this Facebook discussion seem to be up in arms about the unfairness of SPYW and what it means to ANY Google user: http://on.fb.me/A0gt1i