google will give higher rankings to content tied to verified profiles
Google’s former CEO, Eric Schimdt, has just announced that Google will rank websites higher if they are Google + verified.
Taken from his up coming book ‘The New Digital Age’ – this excerpt clearly spells out what direction Google is taking when it comes to Google + and website verification.
“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.”
This makes interesting reading to us search engine marketers, and clearly shows that in the future all Dental Practices serious about Google rankings will have to claim and setup their Google + listing, then link and verify their website.
So what can you do to capitalize on this?
Build a Personal Brand Online
Google have realized just how important social media is as an indicator toward assessing the quality of a website. And because in many ways social media is more about personal branding, (as opposed to company branding) authorship starts to make a lot more sense.
Google doesn’t want to just measure the influence of a brand profile on Twitter/Facebook/Google+ – it wants to know about its employees, its writers, and online fans/followers. Treat your own reputation management seriously and look to build a strong profile on key social sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.
If you’re not an active blogger, you really should start now. It’s never too late! Blogging is a great way to build a personal brand – plus it opens doors to further opportunities such as writing on higher profile sites, conference/event speaking or media interviews, meaning that you can leverage your online profile even further.
Setup Google Authorship For All the Websites You Write On
By connecting your Google+ profile with all of the websites you publish content on, it means that your profile is going to be displayed whenever an article/blog post that you’ve written appears in Google’s search results.
On its own this should naturally increase your following – because people will also click through to your Google+ profile as well. So that’s already helping to build your profile and make you more influential.
Plus it’s going to get you extra traffic by positively influencing rankings within your social circle. Which is also another key reason Google promotes this: it pushes large volumes of traffic through to Google+ and gives users a reason to re-visit.
Use Google+ Daily
Even if you have to force yourself to do it – try spending a small amount of time each day commenting and sharing your connections content, not just your own, to strengthen those connections.
By making a small effort each day, you’ll gradually start to build up a stronger profile.
Use Tools & Interact With Influencers in Your Niche
Firstly identify the key influencers in your industry. Tools like FollowerWonk, Topsy and FindPeopleOnPlus are great for this.
Then get their attention – definitely don’t overdo it by stalking them and replying to everything they say. But make the effort to interact with them occasionally and share their content and hopefully this will go both ways.
In Twitter you can build private lists of people you want to interact with more frequently. Why not do the same with a Google+ circle too?
If you can start getting retweets from people with 10,000+ followers it’s likely to help build your social reach. And again, the same rules apply with shares on Google+.
Another great tool is Google Ripples (see this guide on SEOmoz to show how to use it). Basically, it means you can see who the influential people are when sharing a post and how far it has reached. See this screenshot for the recent announcement of Google Drive:
Does this all seem like too much extra work?
Dental Design do offer a full Social Media management service where we do all this leg work for you. If you have any questions give us a call on 01202677277 and one of the team will be happy to assist.
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