google plus is changing seo strategy
TRANSCRIPT
Google+
AGENDA.
1. Concepts of Google+!2. Advantages of Google+ on SEO!
#GOOGLE+
Google+!
“Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most
users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.” !
!
Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman on his book The New Digital Age!
Google+!
In a December 2012 interview with Fortune magazine, Google CEO Larry Page cast that decision about Google+ data in the most positive of lights. “We have to understand anything you might search for. And people are a big thing you might
search for,” he said at the time. “And so we think about it somewhat differently. We’re going to have people as a first class object in search. We need that to work,
and we need to get started on it.”!!
Larry Page, Google CEO, December 2012 interview with Fortune Magazine!
Content is king?!
“There’s a lot more. It’s not just about content. It’s about identity, relationships and content , and when you start talking about these things and what it takes to build this, the data needed is much more than we can publicly
crawl.” !!
Amit Singhal, Software Engineer at Google in a interview by Danny Sullivan about Search Plus your World!
yet?!
Content was king.!
Now content is a knight at the round table along with identity and relationship.!!
This marks a seminal change in the way Google (and the web in general) are moving: towards the social graph. The social networks are the link profile – and
the PageRank – of the future. The problem is, the social graph is splintered,
proprietary, and held by competing forces. Forces holding tightly to data that will never be open to Googlebot’s crawl.!
Bing is strong then Google ?
The ironic secret is that, while Google has the market share in search, Bing is already in possession of social data from Facebook and Twitter, and blends it into
their results.!!
Without a social platform to call their own, Bing blends social well using data from
the category leaders. If users truly want social integrated with their search experience, then shouldn’t we all be using Bing instead of Google?!
Google BING
2012 65.7% 15.2%
2013 66.9% 18%
Search Engine Market Share by comScore’s
LINK PROFILE.
Google wants Twitter and Facebook data, but only if they get significant access to
the data, enough to understand relationships, influencers, hubs, etc. They need
the link profile of social media; they need the social graph. Think Facebook will
give that to them, for any price?
To take care of this dilemma isn’t it funny how google is pushing Google+
authors?
KEY TAKEWAYS. • Content isn’t king anymore. Content used to be king. Now it’s a knight in the king’s court. The king
is the user. Content serves the king with valuable writings, videos, images, graphics, resources. The best content wins. !
• Relationships are another knight. Relationships allow us to connect with important people, companies, and organizations online. They are what the web (and the world) are built on, too.
Consistent contribution makes healthy relationships possible. Consistency is key.!
• Identity is the last knight. Identity grants “known-ness” to those lucky enough, smart enough, talented enough, or hard working enough to wear that crown. Identities can be powerful allies on the
web, in the never-resting tussle for attention.!
!
!!
Focus on gaining attention from strong identities online (the influencers). Do this by leveraging relationships (your social network), and by producing content of distinction.
Stunning, uncommon, exceptional content.!!
“A good product can only be built where we understand who’s who and who is related to
whom. Relationships are also important alongside content. To build a good product, we have to do all types of processing. But fundamentally, it’s not just about content. It’s
about identity, relationships and content. Anything else trivializes a very hard product.”
Amit Singhal, Software Engineer at Google!
IDENTITY, RELATIONSHIPS & CONTENT.
WHAT IF I TOLD YOU
Google+ CAN BE USED FOR SEO
Studies show a powerful correlation between search rankings and the number of Google +1's
received by a URL. !
!
Searchmetrics found Google +1's to be the most highly correlated factor to search result
rankings, and Moz's 2013 scientific correlation study placed Page Authority just above +1's at the
top of all correlation factors.!
GOOGLE+
GOOGLE+
The biggest difference between Google+ and every other social network, in terms of SEO value, may be the way that user-created content is treated.!!Public posts on Google+ are indexed for search, unlike most tweets, Facebook posts, etc.!!SEO benefits of using Google+. First, posts get crawled and indexed – and it happens quickly because, among other objectives, Google is trying to use Google+ to enhance real-time search. !!Secondly, Google+ is used to optimize search results with rich snippets, including the popular Google Authorship feature that allows the author’s picture and information to appear in search results.!
THE POWER!OF USER-CREATED CONTENT.!
Getting more +1’s, according to Google, doesnʻt mean anything for improving your rank. !What does matter, however, is the link building that happens as a result of +1’s.!!“It is not the +1's themselves that are causing the high rankings of posts but the fact that most +1's on a site result in a shared post on Google+, which creates a followed link back to the post. It's instant organic link
building.”""Mark Traphagen, social media director for Virante!
IMPROVE SERPs WITH MORE +1’s.!!
Another component of the issue of +1 impact on SEO is the Author Rank concept that Google is exploring. The idea here is that more established and trusted authors would get a rankings edge over shadier, less-trustworthy sources.!!The people who have already built trust on Google+ and have extensive, established networks are able to
share their content and gain hundreds or thousands of +1’s and indexed links. !
Author Rank.!!
STEPS TO EARN MORE +1’s!AND INDEXED LINKS !FROM GOOGLE+!
• Make it easy. Create Google+ share buttons!
• Improve your presence. Start engaging with the Google+ community. !
!Don’t use the platform for self-promotion, genuinely be helpful and engage in relationships. !
!Follow the 80/20 rule as a guideline – 80% of your content should be awesome stuff, and 20% of the time
you can share your product.!
• Engage in Communities. Google+ is all about allowing you to find your tribe and engage with people
around their interests. Communities are gold mines for engaging, learning, and sharing helpful, relevant
resources !
• Mentions and Hashtags. Use appropriate hashtags to gain visibility. Mentions can be a great hack for
gaining +1’s by reaching out and getting influencers to +1 and share your content.!
BOOST YOUR CTR WITH!GOOGLE AUTHORSHIP.!
• One important metric for growing your search traffic is your click-through rate (CTR). How many people who
see your page in Google results actually click through to your site?!
!
• Google Authorship puts a face and a name to the search engine results, helping to build trust, communicate
relevance, establish credibility, and improve CTR – in some cases by upwards of 150%. CTR has a direct
correlation to your traffic numbers – so itʼs worth it to set up Google Authorship.!
Welcome [First Name] to the era of personalization : • Amazon.com recommends books you might like • Netflix tailors your movie menu • Google customizes your news.
… and in exchange for this friendly algorithmic assistance, targeted ads follow you wherever you navigate online.
how we see the future.!persuasion
profiling is just around the
corner, and it doesn’t just find
content you might enjoy. It
figures out how you think.
• Some book buyers felt comforted by the fact that an expert reviewer their intended product.
• Others preferred to go with the most popular title or a money-saving deal.
• Some people succumbed to smart, subtle points that require some thinking to get (“The Hunger Games is the Inferno of children’s literature”).
• Still others responded best to being hit over the head with a simple message (“The Hunger Games is a fun, fast read!”).
• While some people rush for a deal, others think discounts mean the merchandise is subpar.
• “By eliminating persuasion styles that didn’t work on a particular individual, we are able to increase the effectiveness of a recommendation by 30 to 40 percent.”
Kaptein and Eckles in a study about persuasion
how we see the future.!
how we see the future.!
When Google introduced authorship markup in 2011, Google did note that they were “looking closely at ways this markup could help us highlight authors and rank search results.”
Now Schmidt has made it explicit: in the future, you can boost your rankings by using Google
authorship, and as we've reported before, Google+ has been designed to be an identity verification network.
But Schmidt doesn't stop there. He essentially predicts that privacy will cease to exist online. Governments, he says, will find it “too risky” to have thousands of citizens “anonymous,
untraceable and unverified” online, suggesting they will want to require verification of all online
accounts at some level of government.