If your’re a frequent visitor to our site, you may already know that Inbound Marketing is a major focus of LTR Digital Group.  The workhorse for a successful inbound strategy is the content you create to provide useful information to your ideal customers or your buyer personas that you identified at the beginning stages of your inbound strategy.

gplusOf course, once you’ve created your content, allowing for it to be found and indexed on the search engines is important.  In this post, I’m going to share some new insights into Google+ and how it’s going to be an increasingly important social media channel to help you get your content discovered and indexed by Google.

An ongoing problem that Google has had over the years is trying to rank content based on the source.  Trying to figure out if the source of the content is trusted and that the content is of value has been a challenge for Google and as long as Google has been working to solve this, SEO types have been trying to figure out how to “game” the system for better search engine ranking.

In the early days, Google used inbound links to content as a way to look towards internet users and website owners to help them discover content  that was considered the most useful and valuable.  The thinking here is that users and website owners would create natural links to content that they felt was good.  At least, that was the logic.  In no time, SEO’s saw the opportunity to create massive links to content in a race to get their content and websites ranked.  An entire industry soon popped up selling link packages that would derail the idea of ranking content (as one of many ranking factors) based on links.  Moral…don’t by links, ever.

But the idea of determining good content and trusted sources is still a valid concept.  Enter Google+.  At first, Google+ was thought to be Google’s attempt to compete with Facebook. After all, it looks like a social network and acts like a social network.  At the end of the day, it may indeed be a social network, but it’s a social channel that packs a big punch for Inbound Marketers or any content creators that want good search engine ranking.

Using what’s called Google authorship, Google’s working to identify real people creating real content and to establish them as a “trusted source” for content.  Be it subject or

industry specific or just general topics (this is because of the search phrases and what’s called semantic search, which we will explore in another blog post).  After all, as Inbound Marketers, we don’t create content to chase keywords and search engine ranking.  We create content to inform and convert.  So we would want our content to be considered as trusted.

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So, Google is beginning to assemble those content creators they consider to be trusted sources and subject experts and beginning to rank their content.  In fact, you may have noticed small pictures showing up next to blog posts and other content.  These are content creators that have taken the steps to create their Google Authorship.  You can see one of my blog posts here.

So here’s where the value of Google+ to Inbound Marketers comes in.

  • You identify and organize your internal experts that become your content creators.
  • You work diligently to blog on a regular basis and provide valuable content that your buyer personas want.
  • You want this content to rank well on search engines so the content you’ve worked hard to create will be found easily by your buyer personas as they’re doing their research looking for the solutions you provide.

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I will be sharing more insights and information about the important role that Google+ can play for you in future blog post.  Now, there’s no doubt that if you’re a B2B company, LinkedIn is an important social media channel.  If you’re B2C, then it’s safe to say that Facebook is important.  While Twitter is valuable to both.  However, pound for pound, when it comes to search engine visibility for your content, Google+ is going to be increasingly valuable. Creating the profiles and Google Authorship for your content creators as well as your brand page now is going to give you a big competitive advantage.

To learn more about Google+, download our free Special Report Google+ Marketing Made Easy.

 

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