The Benefit of Google Plus in Small Business

We’ve been rolling out Google Plus profiles for clients a lot lately and I think I’ve written the same email 50 times explaining why we’re doing it!

Long story short, for 95%+ of the businesses we work with there isn’t really any social benefit to utilising Google Plus right now…BUT there can be a huge SEO and search engine traffic benefit when your Google Plus profile is integrated properly with your website and you’re regularly updating your website blog or news page.

If you take a look at the screenshot examples below you’ll see what I mean – I’ve done a search for my own name and business name in Google and you’ll see my profile picture appears next to this website in the search results, a super simple way to stand out amongst the competing websites. We’ve been seeing dramatic increases in click through rates and traffic for clients we’ve set these up for.

How to do it…
There are a handful of components required to get this working properly:

• a personal Google Plus profile
• a link on your Google Plus profile to your website
• a website platform that supports the REL Author tags and has them implemented properly
• use of the blog part of your website or pages on your site that attributed to an author

This traffic strategy isn’t really a DIY technique but definitely something to be aware of and taking advantage of – your website developer or SEO provider should be able to help you with this one.