Using Google + for Business

Jul 14, 2011 // by Tim Ruswick // Social Media // 1 Comment

Recently I had the pleasure of being invited to Google + Beta by a friend of mine on Facebook. Aside from the interest in being part of an exclusive group and the curiosity that came out of all the buzz, I just had to sign up. What I found though was not what I expected at all.

Google, as usual, had succeeded in creating something so outside of the box, yet so simple and familiar you could pick it right up without a tutorial. In fact, Google + just hit over 10 million users a day ago, and that’s in a PRIVATE, invitation only beta.

Hat’s off to Google for finally stepping on Facebook’s toes.

Naturally, it wasn’t long before I started to think about how this could be utilized for business, right?

Well after bouncing the idea around in my head for awhile, I randomly decided to Google my name and saw that my Google + profile showed up at the top of the results, with not only my picture, but my tag line and the first sentence of my bio!

What surprised me even more is that I added Web Vitals, my facebook profile and my Twitter profile to the personal links section, and all 3 links showed up right there on the search results page for my name right below my picture and bio!

Now here’s the thing, any SEO guy will tell you that title and content changes can take a while to show up on the Google search engine, even if the GoogleBot references your site often, it doesn’t index it quickly all the time…so for the most part you are stuck with an old listing on the search engine even if you have new content, and you have to wait for Google to take it’s sweet time updating everything.

But here’s the awesome part…

After some more tinkering, it seems that updating your tag line and your bio changes the Google search listing almost instantly! It updates your picture, your tag line AND your bio almost in real time, which is pretty amazing.

So as a business tool, you can see that listing your business and making it a public profile will allow you to show up at the top of the listings…

It will also give you a way to change info instantly and have it reflect in the search engine when people search for you!

This would really come in handy if you deal with current events or things that are time specific, but even if you don’t, it’s pretty awesome to have stuff change instantly…

To wrap everything up, you should get a Google + profile for your business for the following: