Has Google+ impacted your business in a big way?  Struggling to gain any ground with this social network?  No matter what it has become of your efforts leave a comment about the strategies you tried and how they have affected your business.  I would like to thank everyone in advance for sharing!

I read Brogan’s book, too, but it didn’t really help me either.  Everything I’ve learned about how to use Google Plus, including effective strategies, has been from doing my own online research.

How you use Google Plus is going to depend on what you’re trying to accomplish.  If you are using it for ecommerce, it is going to be very difficult, unless you’re a huge brand that everyone already knows.

I follow a lot of the huge brands, it appears that even they are struggling on Google Plus.  I haven’t seen an amazing example of an active ecommerce Google Plus page at all (please point me to one if you have!).  The ones I have seen have frequent posts with zero engagement.  Everyone just seems lost. Google Plus is more for people who have blogs, or for news sites, social commentary, photography…not so much for ecommerce.

Personally, I use Google Plus, but only for SERP value.  I have tried everything to get it to be an important tool in my traffic and conversion, but have only found it good for SERPs.  I will continue to post there, though, as I need a great ranking.

Cadbury’s have been doing a pretty good job..

https://plus.google.com/117517201037060589294/posts

@craigdesmarais I love Google+! Not so much as a social media platform, but as an excellent SEO tool.

Before I built my website – My business went from not being found anywhere on Google to page 1 (for my name, which is my website name and business name) WOO HOO! When I actually built my website I landed on page 5 and shot up like a bullet! (for my search term MailChimp expert) Now if someone is signed into a Google account and is searching in my neck of the woods I show up right below MailChimp.com on page 1. I’m getting calls from all over the country for my MailChimp skills.

Also I’ve been experimenting with using G+ as a blogging platform, with links out to my site. So far it’s working well! Google does immediately index any link that is posted on G+.

http://AmyHall.biz/GooglePlus

I’m not a huge fan of Google+. Personally, I’m not posting anything there because none of my friends is using it. I created a business account for my customer for the only reason to improve the Google ranking. I get almost zero engagement, which is really frustrating and which makes me more or less copy/paste my FB messages onto G+ only.

Hi @amyhallbiz can you explain what you mean by “link to the Facebook page, so it gets crawled”  Are you creating a backlink?

@dongrandy  Every time you post a link on G+ the site at the other end gets “crawled” by Google. (kinda sounds like every time you hear a bell ring an Angel gets their wings.)

Crawling a site is when Google’s bots go through the link and onto the receiving website. They then “crawl” or scan the site for key-worded content. It’s a cheap thrill for us SEO types. It helps Google to immediately index your content rather than waiting for the bots to leisurely, take their time to find your site and index it. When Google indexes your site it finds out what your content is and how to best promote you on its search engine.