Google+: rather alive than dead

Being educated about what foreign SEO experts think about the effectiveness of the Google+ service as a promotion tool is a fascinating occupation: a site promising to open the reader “6 reasons to register on Google+ today” is adjacent to the search results with the article with the life-affirming title “The collapse of Google+ and its consequences for SEO scope. " In the end, you have to make your own opinion on personal experience - good, enough experience.

We worked with Google for about a year, including from the very beginning it was included in the number of social services that it was decided to actively use to promote the company's products. We were ready to quickly change the policy, if the dark rumors about a dying service are confirmed and the costs of creating content will not pay off. But Google+ pleasantly surprised us in several ways.
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The first surprise was the sensational privileges in search engine optimization.

The fact that Google encourages the use of its services, ranking with a greater or lesser addiction depending on the presence or absence of an account, is well known information. But reading about it was not as pleasant as watching it in action. We did everything in full accordance with the usual recommendations: we filled out the profile, provided regular content updates, generously added key requests to the assigned post with information about ourselves, and therefore, of course, we rightfully expected some results. The results were faster and more unexpected than expected.

First, we counted on a gradual increase in the position of the site itself, but not on the parallel rapid rise of the post itself, which refers to one or another of its pages. For six months we had the pleasure to see our posts several times on the first pages of the issue on medium-frequency queries, next to the sites of serious competitors. At first they even suspected that Google simply “personalized” the issue in a similar way to make us pleasant, but checks from different accounts and IP did not confirm this version. And the jump in traffic at the time that the page was kept in the TOP area, spoke for itself. Of course, the effect was less than if the page itself had reached such positions — after all, the user was separated from the site by an additional click — but there was no need to complain.



And the funny thing - the first time it happened almost by accident. In contrast to the fixed, standard posts, with descriptions of a particular product, we did not saturate with keywords so diligently. Just one of the phrases encountered in the ad text a couple of times, obviously, was perceived by the robot as a key request - it was this that brought the page to high positions.

Thus, we were convinced that rumors about the usefulness of this social network are not exaggerated, and began to consider it as one of the reliable tools of search engine optimization. Fortunately, this did not stop there - otherwise we did not know about the potential of Google+ as a platform for promoting products.

I started by saying that cemetery metaphors are often spoken about Google+: now unviable service, now extinct, then stillborn. Inevitably, you begin to think of it as some kind of ashes, where you will not see a living person and where to go and see something, it only makes sense to ingratiate yourself with the search engine. This is not entirely fair.

The structure of Google+ is somewhat specific compared to other popular social networks. It consists of three types of virtual spaces - personal blogs of users, multi-user communities of interest, and finally, tag clouds, which combine posts of the same subject. From the point of view of external optimization, we were interested in, of course, mainly the second and third ones. At first, when posts were created more for a search engine than for users, we focused mainly on the clouds, putting a row of relevant tags to each post. However, I cannot say that this attracted many users who were not subscribed to the blog - posts are quickly lost in the feed of popular tags, and the tapes of unpopular ones are completely ignored. Later, when it was necessary to draw one-time attention to the widest possible audience, we, among other things, tried to do a newsletter on Google+ subject groups, expecting a result comparable to what we had from using tags. By the way, the groups attracted us primarily because of their relative democracy in everything related to accepting new members and posting, compared to the same public posts on Facebook, which moderate their content very tightly. And the users themselves, as it turned out later, turned out to be more open for advertising and less inclined to dismiss offers as spam. According to the results of the experiment, the number of downloads over the next few days increased several times and, which is no less valuable, we received a detailed feedback from a number of users belonging to that small segment of our target audience who could rate the application from the point of view of a professional.

After testing the same tactics on several other applications, we concluded that Google+ is irreplaceable when emergency short-term “infusions” of traffic are required, especially if we are talking about a niche product (of course, provided that the groups for placement are selected correctly). Less targeted products, such as arcade games, tend to be lost among the masses like them.

So, my verdict is this: whatever Google expects in the future, at the moment it is a multifunctional social network and a flexible promotion tool that can give a blogger a number of advantages. Informative, unique posts with graphic elements, activity in “public” spaces and tags will help to gather a small but loyal audience. Key requests and, again, high-quality, unique content will attract Google’s attention to both the blog and the site it represents. Finally, advertising in relevant thematic communities (first of all, niche ones) from time to time can provide additional traffic. So, don’t be in a hurry to refuse Google services - it’s probably the company that really doesn’t offer anything bad.