Google+ can help improve local search visibility for small and medium businesses by investing a small amount of time in a business page. As search algorithms increasingly consider social media, having a Google+ presence is important. However, research shows that very few Google users actually use Google+ actively, posting more than 5 times, though many may still view content passively. Maintaining a basic Google+ presence can provide some SEO and customer engagement benefits without requiring significant additional resources.

1. G+ FOR
BUSINESS
U D I T B H A T I A
I N D I A N I N S T I T U T E O F F O R E I G N T R A D E

2. KINGPIN
• Investing even a little bit of time and energy into your business page on Google+ can
mean improved local search visibility, especially for a small to medium-sized business.
• With search engine algorithms constantly evolving and becoming more intertwined
with social media, the lines denoting where SEO stops and social begins are becoming
blurrier by the day.
• Most of the online or digital tracking tool require google as almost 80% of the online
search happens on it, this makes G+ even more significant for online visibility.
• Google has browser integration which Facebook and Twitter don’t.
• It is not a social network but a social layer across al Google platforms.

3. UPPING THE ANTE
• Anyone who has something to sell would be crazy to pass up an opportunity to get
their brand in front of qualified leads, right? Search engine optimization is all about
getting your website found by your potential customers, and Google’s got the majority
of the market share when it comes to search.
• Google+ content itself — meaning content you post to your page — can rank in
search results in instances where your website may not. Each post has a unique URL
and, when the content generates interaction, can potentially rank in search results!
• Apart from user traffic, there is, of course, the value of the universal login that is tied to
Google+. People are now using Google search from an account that they are logged
into, which makes it easier to track user profiles.

4. SECONDARY RESEARCH DATA
• Stone Temple consulting did a research in which they reviewed 516,246 randomly selected
Google+ profiles. Only 10 % had an a G+ account associated with their Google profile. Ten
percent of 2.5 billion is only 250 million, and the number of active users is far less than that.
• The recent figures from Stone Temple Consulting would seem to back up Enge Morbius'
January data. Enge's data shows that only 6.6 million users have ever made 50 or more
posts on Google+ and only 3.5 million of them have been active in the last 30 days. These
figures discount YouTube comments, which are automatically posted on Google+.
Astonishingly, only 1.49 percent or 32.9 million users have ever made more than five public
posts on the network.
• Thus, it is not frequented enough, but here’s the catch. For starters, there are probably far
more than a few million eyeballs on the stream each month. Most users of social media
rarely post anything and just read others' posts. These "lurkers" are just as valuable to
advertisers as "active" users, but it's very difficult to estimate their numbers. There's also a
lot of private sharing done on Google+ that isn't accounted for here, especially when it
comes to things like sharing photographs with family.
• So, despite the fact that the Google+ stream does actually appear to be a relative
wasteland, don't expect it to go away anytime soon.

5. SUGGESTED STRATEGY
• Keep the G+ account live and kicking. It need not be updated as frequently as other
social media channels but updating it once in a month to make sure that the followers
are kept engaged.
• The content strategy here need not be different from other social media. Also,
additional man- hours need not be wasted to strategize content for G+ as the
customer acquisition quotient won’t be high. It is just to add that little bit of zing to
the SEO and for customer engagement largely.
CURRENT FOLLOWERS of ShopClues = 143,262