Why Google+ is Big News for Online Marketers in 2014 by Megan Totka

In a marketing world filled with social media and information overload, content marketing has always been an important ingredient for success. Now, most industry experts have predicted that 2014 will be the Year of Content Marketing—and that Google+ will be essential for a strong online marketing strategy.

The search engine giant’s social network, launched in 2011, is still young compared to the other big players on the social scene. But there are already more than 340 million active monthly members on Google+, a number that’s second only to behemoth Facebook’s 1.2 billion.

Still, what makes Google+ so important for marketers in a content-driven era?

Here are three compelling reasons to integrate this platform into your 2014 online marketing strategy.

Content is for Searching—and Google Dominates Searches

The primary goal of content marketing is to increase your search engine rankings—for your website, your social media pages, and your shared content. Of course, there are other search engines besides Google, but there’s a reason “Googling” has become the most popular way to say “searching for something online.” According to the latest comScore data, Google holds 66.7% of the search engine market share. Microsoft’s Bing, the second-place search engine, doesn’t even come close with 18.1% of the market.

While Google doesn’t outright confirm this, it’s clear that content on Google+ is viewed favorably by its parent search engine. Active Google+ users enjoy higher rankings on the biggest search engine in the world.

Local SEO + Mobile Search = More Business

Some social networks have been late to the party with this feature, but Google+ has always offered a strong local component since the rollout of the network. Business pages on Google+ have evolved from the initial Google Places to the integrated Google+ Local, which provides plenty of helpful features for businesses.

Perhaps more importantly, these pages tend to rank high in local search terms—an essential consideration for mobile search since Google dominates even more than browser-based search with over 90% market share. And mobile search not only brings people to your business, it keeps them there: Search Engine Watch reports that 82% of shoppers use mobile phones to help them make in-store decisions.

Google+ Gives Your Content More Authority

When it comes to content marketing, it’s important that your potential customers view you as a trusted source. With Google+, you can lend your content more authority through Google Authorship.

The Google Authorship program lets you link content you publish anywhere on the web to your Google+ profile. This not only enables easier sharing, so your content gains more traction—it also heightens your visibility. Content that’s published using Google Authorship shows up on Google search results alongside your photo and bio from Google+, making your results instantly noticeable and boosting your authority.

Courtesy of B2B Community

How should success in SEO be measured in 2014 by Pierre Zarokian

January 14, 2014

Google has definitely made it much harder to rank naturally via SEO. Not only their algorithms have become much better at detecting unnatural links and SEO tactics, but also the layout of their search results have changed so that there are more components resulting in natural results to show up lower. In addition, the discontinuation of keyword data in the Google Analytics has created further issues in tracking success based on keywords.

The success for an SEO campaign should not be measured by having many #1's but should be measured on overall visibility and traffic to the website. SEO should be done not only for the website, but also for your social media sites and Youtube videos. The more content you can get in the search engines the better your results will be. Sometimes Youtube videos or social media content may rank highly for your keywords, which may result in traffic to your site.

The goal should be to get traffic to your site any way you can via any channel, not just SEO. Google is now looking at social activity as a factor, so not only social activity may result in traffic by itself, but also it may result in better natural rankings.

In some cases it might be easier to make a YouTube video rank for a keyword than a regular site, especially if there are very little videos about the subject that already rank in Google. If you create videos for this purpose, make sure to include links to your website from the description of the YouTube video and have a call to action in the video itself, which may be asking visitors to call you or visit your website.

If you search for a local business with a city name, you would most likely see a mix of 7 results from Google Local, which means natural results are pushed even further down. If you are a local business, you have to also optimize your Google Local profile and get as many reviews as possible. Local SEO has its own techniques, so make sure to hire someone that knows how to do this or do further research if you are going to do it yourself.

Since Google discontinued providing keyword data in Google Analytics, it has become much harder to track SEO success based on keywords. Therefore, here is another reason why marketers need to think of other ways to track success.

Ultimately the goal of each site is to get as much traffic as possible and also have descent conversion. Therefore, tracking traffic and conversation is probably the best way to measure SEO success going forward. Web stats need to be carefully analyzed to see where exactly the traffic is coming from. For social media, use tracking URL’s such as goo.gl or bit.ly to see exactly how many people are clicking on certain links.

Courtesy of Clarity Digital Group LLC d/b/a Examiner.com

JPC does NOT rely solely on Google Analytics to provide website traffic reporting and analysis for their clients. 
We use companies like Web-Stat for FULL reporting!!
Contact us and visit: http://www.janetpennconsulting.com/website_traffic.html