Google + is the social network that just keeps expanding at a rapid rate. the last figure that was released told us that the site currently has a user base of 50 million, which is an astonishing statistic. It must be mentioned that G+’s rival, Facebook, has acquired more than 800 million users in its lifetime. Nevertheless, Google + is rocketing in terms of how active it is becoming. If Plus does become the dominant network, then businesses will be flocking across to join, so I am going to show you how to optimize your business profile so you can show up in high positions for key terms.

I have created a brand new profile for SEO Positive as an example. This profile has only a display picture, the profile contains no content (for example media or posts). I have also checked all of our keywords and we do not rank for any of them. Now I will do some optimization in the appropriate sections and see what difference it makes.

It may also be noteworthy that I have created another brand new profile with absolutely no history to measure the rankings in a completely unbiased way.

Introduction

I started off with the introduction section of the profile, not necessarily keyword stuffing, but I put in what I considered enough and made the box legible and of a proper standard of English. The introduction is as follows:

“SEO Positive is the award winning SEO Company based in the UK. SEO Positive offers ethical SEO Services that are guaranteed to show brilliant results in SEO. For more information on SEO Positive, go to http://www.seo-positive.co.uk or follow their blog or even their Twitter profile.”

Now before I added this section we did not rank at all, as soon I had made changes to the profile, the rankings had changed too

Just by adding this one box you can see the SEO Positive profile has shot right up, and although it isn’t ranking for everything, it is ranking for some key terms. Obviously the term “SEO” will be the hardest to rank for but we will add another section and see what happens.

Bragging Rights

In the next section, “bragging rights” I tend to write something similar to the introduction but put in some achievements to make it fit the context of the section. So my submission to bragging rights is “SEO Positive has won multiple awards as an SEO Company, we provide our SEO Services to a wide range of businesses all over the world, including the UK, which is where SEO Positive is based.”

Now that this section has been added, we will look at the difference:

From this evidence, it is safe to say that there are no “bragging rights” here. This section may have some effect but it is clear that it is miniscule and hardly worth the time.

Occupation

Now I am going to try and add the appropriate occupation and see what effect that has: ‘SEO Services’.

Adding the occupation seems to have had a mixed set of results. The bonus is that nothing has fallen but some positions have stayed put. ‘SEO’ has raised and is now on the listings, yet ‘SEO Services’ is holding its ground.

Employment

We now approach the section of Employment. I have added the name of the company (SEO Positive) and for occupation I entered SEO Services. SEO Services is the keyword that the SEO Positive profile is not ranking for; this keyword also fits the context of the field quite well.

The employment section has had a surprising impact. Everything is now ranking, most search terms are rising, ‘SEO company’ fell by 1 rank but this could be due to competitors or other uncontrollable reasons. All in all the completion of the employment section has had a great effect.

Other Names

Education comes next but I want to take the white hat method in optimizing my Google+ profile, so I will leave this blank as it is irrelevant. Then comes the phone number, so I have entered SEO Positive’s office number. The ‘relationship’ and ‘looking for’ are also immaterial so the next field that can be used for SEO will be the ‘other names’ section. I am going to put all keywords in this section.

Adding this other names section seems to have had a negative effect, my thoughts of this decline in positions is because Google has to index all of these changes, which resulted in massive jumps in positions, especially for ‘SEO’ and ‘SEO Services’. Adding the other name would appear to have had a positive effect on ‘SEO Company’ but the 1 position increase doesn’t make up for the rest of the losses.

Nicknames

As the end of optimization approaches, we come to the ‘nicknames’ section. I have set it as ‘SEO Services’ because again, this is a term that hasn’t ranked.

Just adding the nickname section has had a great effect on the rankings, I think it is safe to say that ‘SEO’ and ‘SEO Services’ are going to be very competitive, like in the real Google SERP’s.

Profiles, Links and Contributions

There is only one more thing that can be done in terms of the profile, which is adding other profiles – websites that you contribute to and recommended links. I will add all of these at the same time as it is far too fiddly to do them one by one, also I will link to only SEO Positives’ profiles, the site and all blogs associated.

From these results we can see that no difference had been made by adding links or profiles. It seems that these parts of the profile are purely for the user.

Conclusion

All of these factors have had different levels of impact, but based on the differences that have been displayed, here is a list of each factor and the severity of their importance:

Introduction                                       -                                              *****

Bragging Rights                                 -                                              *

Occupation                                         -                                              **

Employment                                      -                                              ****

Other Names                                     -                                              *

Nicknames                                          -                                              ****

Profiles Links Contributions         -                                              *

So I can conclude that the most important sections of the Google Plus profile are the Introduction, Employment and the Nicknames. However I would not advise leaving the other parts out as it may result in weaker positions; also it lowers how useful your profile will be to users viewing it.

As a revision of all of the positions, I want to check the positions once more as the positions would have had time to settle and we can take all of the optimization efforts and put them together.

If we look back to where we started before we even optimized the profile, SEO Positive has raised a substantial amount. Taking into account that this profile is brand new and has no posts or media, it has acquired great positions. The only way to increase the ranking is to keep the profile active and consciously include the correct keywords in posts. As time goes on we should definitely see an even bigger rise in positions.

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SEO Positive Limited is one of the most trusted digital marketing agencies in the country, specialising in search engine optimisation, Pay Per Click account management and a diverse range of promotional services, including social media integration and online reputation management.

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Tags: case, google, optimization, plus, study