Welcome to “The Mailbag” a place where we take the best emails and questions that we receive each day about Digital, Social, Branding and Content Marketing and we share our thoughts to help Small and Medium Businesses build stronger online brands.

Broadsuite MailbagQuestion: Our company is hearing a lot about Google+.  Until now we haven’t really looked at the platform, but the more we hear about the more we are wondering if we should be.  Does our business need Google+?

In just the past 6 Months Google+ usage has jumped by nearly 200 million users to reach 540 million active accounts.  (This defined by the person using the account in some way during each 30 day period)

This massive jump in users alone should be a big indicator of the importance of Google+ and why your business should be on Google+.  Having said that, there are a lot of great blogs out there that will list the reasons why Google+ is great giving you everything from the friendly visual format to the impact Google+ has on SEO.

For the sake of your business not missing out on how Google+ can help your business, I want to focus on one major reason your company and employees should be using Google+:

To put more of your business’s content in front of your target audience.

For those somewhat unfamiliar with how Google+ works, it is very similar to other platforms in that you post content to a page. You have both a personal presence and a business presence.  With Google+ people can comment and +1 your comment whereas in Facebook they will like your post and with Twitter they can retweet (RT).

The really important and often unknown detail for most businesses is that the +1 is where the magic lies.

As most people are aware, Google has become highly aware of many of our search behaviors, yet the vast majority of us continue to reveal our search data to google.  This allows for Google to be smarter about what we search, but also raises attention for some privacy matters.

Being that most of us search this way, Google is able to rank content differently based upon your networks response to content on Google+.  Meaning that if you share your content and it is +1’d by a few or many of those in your Google Circles, your ranking will shoot up.  Essentially Google is looking at how your friends and/or network views the content and they adjust ranking appropriately (as compared with an incognito/private search).

Knowing that google has surpassed 500 million users, this begs the question, are our friends, customers, and advocates using Google+?  The answer each and every day is increasing and this is precisely why your business does need Google+.

The bottom line is by building a community through Google+, your content has exponential opportunities to rank higher based on those of similar interest giving your content a +1.  The more +1, the more potential eyeballs that will see your content.  It really is that simple so if your business wants more eyeballs on your content, especially via Google search there may not be a more understandable way to achieve it than properly utilizing Google+.

 Here is a great in depth look at Google+ 1 and the effect on SEO from Search Engine Watch 

Is your business using Google+ to increase visibility and rise up the search rankings?

 

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