Two Google+ SEO Guides You Should Read

The conventional wisdom where Google+ and online marketing goes is this: Even if your audience isn’t active there, it’s almost mandatory to have a profile and be active there because of the way Google is showing more Google+ content in its regular search results.

It’s still early days for Google+ and the potential search/SEO benefits of being active there, but there are two recently published guides that go a long way to helping explain what Google is doing and how search marketers (and their clients) can take advantage.

On the Conversation Marketing blog, Ian Lurie yesterday published a lengthy article called Google Plus Box Ranking Factors Report. In it, he investigates (with help from a few dozen industry peers) how Google+ profiles show up in the Related People and Pages from Google+ search results of Google’s “Search Plus Your World” feature.

Here are some of the takeaways:

Fresh content matters: Google+ profiles with no posts within the last 72 hours don’t show up in the “Related People/Pages” section of Google’s search results
Pages can matter more than profiles: Brand pages with a few thousand followers/circlers can appear in “Related People/Pages” ahead of individual profiles with a million or more followers/circlers
+1s matter: Lurie says that profiles/pages that get a lot of +1s on their posts tend to show up more often in the “Related People/Pages” results
Comments and reshares don’t matter as much as +1s in helping to influence who/what shows up in “Related People/Pages”
Reach/follower count matter a lot
On a similar note, AJ Kohn recently published an article he called The Ultimate Google+ SEO Guide. This article is almost a month old now, and that may explain why it draws some different conclusions about why certain pages and profiles show up in Google.com’s “Related Pages/People” section.

In addition to looking at how Google+ pages and profiles rank there, Kohn also investigates possible ranking considerations when searching inside Google+ itself, i.e., what factors influence the search results if you type “SEO” into the Google+ search box and want to look for relevant users. Some of the takeaways on that topic are:

The search term must appear in one of these sections of your profile: Introduction, Employment, Education or Places. For example, Danny Sullivan didn’t show up in Google+ searches for “SEO” until he added that keyword into the Introduction section of his Google+ profile.
Using the keyword in more than one of those fields helps.
The “Occupation” field isn’t used.
There’s already a fair amount of spamming of these profile fields happening.
Kohn’s article also examines possible reasons why certain Google+ content shows up in the “Search Plus Your World” results on Google.com.

Together, these are two Google+ SEO guides that I think you’ll want to read and bookmark. Here are the links again to save you the hassle of scrolling up.

Google Plus Box Ranking Factors Report
The Ultimate Google+ SEO Guide
And if you need more on this topic, I’ll add that there’s a panel dedicated to SEO for Google+ at our SMX West conference, which is less than two weeks away.

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