On Google Plus? Is it working for you? Believe it or not, Google Plus can play a viral role in your social media strategy as well as search engine marketing. Here is an example.
We searched “Visual Marketing Mistakes” on Google and got one G+ page on the second place. The only reason is, we follow the business page of TechShu on Google Plus, so the result appeared on the SERP. Google weighs G+ posts more than other websites, as you can see in the screenshot.
In this article, we’ll show you how G+ can be used creatively to make it work for your business.
Explore the right hashtags:
We all know that G+ allows hashtags like other social networks. But hashtags on G+ work quite differently than that of others. G+ has a separate tool to give you more insights about any particular hashtag. Let’s explore. https://plus.google.com/explore
Once you enter a hashtag, it would provide you with the list of most popular hashtags on the given topic. Similarly, if you click on any of these hashtags, it would give you the related best options, associated with the hashtag.
So, whenever you post a content on G+, make sure to check the most popular hashtags in the category or keyword. You can use as much hashtags as you want with one post to increase the visibility. But having said that, we also would advise you not to exceed 5 hashtags in one post, else you would end up pissing your audience off.
Drive traffic through Communities:
G+ Communities are a wonderful tool to drive traffic to your website and at the same to increase your thought leadership on a given subject. There are hundreds of communities on the platform but not all of them are worth your content and time. Choose wisely. Look for communities that are more active.
Run a query for your desired communities. G+ would show you a number of communities related to your search term. You can find out the member and post number on the list. But you should check each one of them manually before finally joining any one of them.
Use formatting options:
This is the biggest advantage of G+ over other social networks. You can actually format your description to bring more attention. Here is a list of formating options that are available on the platform.
However, you must include these options strategically. For example, if your post has a headline, you can create bold fonts for the area. If you want to highlight the keywords in the description, you can italicize it. Let’s look at an example.
Post more often:
As explained in the beginning, G+ has a lot to do with your search engine friendliness. So, in order to ensure that it works for you, you must post more often, so more and more people would add you to their circles. Moreover it would increase your visibility and community reach.
Now the question is what is the best frequency of posting on Google Plus. According to a latest Buffer App blog, business pages should post 3 times a day at most. They showed a corelation between post frequency and reach. When business pages post less than 3 times a day, they have found 50% decrease in their overall traffic.
Create Collections to drive attention:
Google+ Collection is the newest feature of the network. And the fun part is, you don’t need to create your audience for your Collections. People, who are following you, are automatically following your collections. Moreover, Collections work wonderfully well for SEO on the space. Let’s take a look.
If your audience is searching for a specific term on G+, your Collection posts have greater chance to appear first, depending on the freshness of content. However, you also can share your Collection posts with your G+ circles ad communities separately to ensure better reach.
Over to you:
If you are still hesitant and thinking if G+ would at all work for you, we would recommend to start right away. You will certainly notice the different after a short while.
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