Almost everyone out there has at least heard of Google Plus (also know as Google+ or g+), but judging by my interactions with clients, most people don’t know what it really is or how they should use it. For those that do use it, questions have started to come up in the last year as to how long Google+ will be around, or how they should cross that invisible line between personal social spaces and business listings. What exactly is Google Plus and why is it important?
What is Google Plus?
For those that are not familiar with it, Google+ started as a social media platform. It was created to compete with Facebook, but has never really felt the same as the other social media sites. I think that’s because people are looking at Google + with too narrow a view-finder. Transitioning out of a social media space you’re already committed to is hard, and a lot of people generally feel like they just can’t add one more thing to the suite of services they’re already managing. I propose, however, that when you take in the entire Google ecosystem, you can see the huge impact G+ can have on your social identity and on the search engine presence your business needs.
The long term view is this: Google is attempting to consolidate all their individual products into a single, streamlined experience and Google Plus is the proverbial key to the kingdom. They even put together a nice little website to explain how all the pieces fit together. You can learn more about this consolidation here: http://www.google.com/+/learnmore/better/ . Granted, this is a slow roll – process shifts like this move more like glaciers than rapids, but it is happening. You can see evidence of this shift in the changes to the search page to preference places and local options and in the way ads are presented already. (See my post on SEO for 2015 for more on those changes.)
Why Google + is Important for Your Business
Google has always been pretty transparent about what they want you to do in order to ‘get found’ in their search engine. This transparency is a core part of their mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” (Visit the About Google company profile on their webpage if you want to read more).
It makes sense, then, that they would be open about how to do that, right? In a nutshell, Google+ is the best way to organize all the information about your business that has been stored up in the various Google products into a single space so they can work together, not against each other, to help you ‘get found’. This means your YouTube channel can help your brick and mortar show up on that fancy map you see occasionally in Google search.
If you fill in the profile info on your ‘places’ listing, you’re telling the search engines more important things about your business – like operating hours, if it has a parking lot, your phone number. You can also display reviews (if you have clientele that leaves them, that is). Take that, Yelp and Angie’s List!
Google Plus even provides a simple how to get started list on the Google Plus website.
The most complicated part is waiting for a post card to the location you’re trying to confirm. This step is required to verify your account and can cause some consternation because it delays the gratification you receive from completing a task and makes this process take a week instead of an hour.
Is Google+ staying or is it going?
For those that have been using Google+ for their own business or for their client’s business, in the past year or so the fate of Google+ has been up in the air. Google has been adamant that Google+ is going to be sticking around and David Besbris (the man who took over the Google+ project after the last head of the project left the company) has insisted that they are “very happy with the progress of Google+”.
On the other side, tech experts and online marketing professionals are pointing to signs that Google+ is not okay:
After almost 4 years, Google+ has failed to achieve even half of the popularity and use levels of other social media platforms. For example, per the Seattle Times, Neilson researchers, “estimate that 27.4 million U.S. residents visited the Google+ website in April (2014) and 45.6 million opened its smartphone app, with some overlap between the two. Nielsen’s estimates for Facebook were 117.8 million U.S. users on the website and 116.7 million on the mobile app, also with some overlap”.
Google has also started breaking off features, like Google Hangouts and the Photos tool, from Google+ and giving them their own platform. Both seem to be better products since they have been broke off on their own and neither one of them require that the user sign up for a Google+ account.
At the 2014 Google I/O conference, Google+ was noticeably absent from discussion.
Vic Gundotra, the man behind Google+, is no longer with Google.
In my opinion, all these things focus on the narrow view that Google+ is trying to fit into a space occupied by Facebook and not the broader, product consolidation / SEO point of view. It doesn’t matter how well Google+ competes with Facebook. The benefit to consolidating your presence in the Google ecosystem is undeniable.
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