If you run or work for a small business, you may have heard that having a profile and staying active on Google+ can help your organic visibility.
This is true in that, among many other things, search engines trust social signals (especially from their own social networks) to determine who an organization is and what its customers want and need online. The more active your organization is on a social network such as Google+, and the more your users leverage your presence there, the more it can help you.
However, there are reasons to engage in a Google+ profile and presence other than to help your organic visibility.
If you happen to be running any paid ads on Google (via Google AdWords), there are additional features that you will have access to as a result of your Google+ account. These features include social annotations and the ability to enable the location extension pulling your Google+ information rather than just a manually entered address.
By leveraging these features, your PPC ads will be elongated, appearing much larger than that of your competitors, working to increase your click-through rate (CTR).
After working to help increase your website’s presence and therefore corresponding traffic through the results in Google, a Google+ account can help your overall brand awareness. Now that Google offers results specifically for Google+, for example, in Google Maps, people who may not even be looking for you have the ability to learn who you are. This allows even more ways for a user to get to your website and become a visitor and potential customer.
So if you run or work for a small business and don’t have a Google+ account, now is the time. With the trends we have already seen, the areas in which the account will help you are continuing to grow.
Allie Kelly is team lead of paid search at Zeon Solutions
