Google+ is what websters and ecommerce retailers love to hate on: it came in late to the game, couldn’t seem to make up its mind how it would be defined, and has appeared to fail to make a serious mark on the social media scene. Giving it a casual glance, it seems like Google+ is the youngest sibling in the family. The site is stuck with the family’s hand-me-downs and can’t seem to get any recognition, yet it’s still in the picture and stubbornly refuses to go away. With the last point, is it possible that we’re just looking at Google+ wrong and not using it for what it’s meant to be used for? Could using Google+ for ecommerce sellers be a way of increasing sales?
Google+ is Great for…SEO
It makes perfect sense and yet it’s not the first thing that comes to mind, but if there’s a site that has “Google” contained in it, you can bet they make excellent bedfellows. But it’s always more complex than just that, and involves something called “the database of affinity”.
How it works is like this: everything that people like, share, tweet, post and just generally show a favourable preference for on the Internet is gathered into this database of affinity. But don’t get too excited just yet. The database of affinity is still in the theoretical stage right now, but experts are placing their bets on Google, not Facebook or Twitter.
- There’s a lot — like a lot a lot — of data from a lot of sources. Amazon collects 6 million+ reviews each month; Twitter records 1.5 billion+ tweets per month; Facebook records 80 billion+ “likes” per month…and Google+ has 540 million monthly active users, plus all the data they record.
- Google has a proven track record in efficiently making sense of that data. To be really simple about it, anyone can theoretically aggregate data into one system (e.g. take a look at all the thousands of emails you have in your inbox), but not just anyone can make that meaningful. To stay on the email example, Google has done just that by sorting your inbox into Primary, Social and Promotions.
- Advertising has to be custom-drawn from all that data. Remember the very first websites and how they were largely text-based? It may have had all the information present in one location, but it was difficult to get a sense of each one’s significance. This is why children’s voices aren’t strongly featured in car commercials — they’re typically linked with automobiles, and aren’t convincing at selling the product.
What Matters is Click-Through Rate (CTR)
You may be thinking what any of this talk about the database of affinity has to do with SEO, particularly for online sellers, and it comes down to how Google is superior at sorting and knowing what to make of your friends’ tastes.
The Search Engine Results Page is the Holy Grail upon which everything is measured in the Internet, and Searchmetric found that +1’s on Google+ were the biggest thing to get ranked highly. Let your mind run away with conspiracy theories if you like, but the bottom line is sharing data on Google+ tends to get you noticed more than other sources. Combine unique product descriptions with a little bit of sharing of those on Google+ and you just might find more people finding your products for sale online.
Mind you, this is no guarantee that Google+ will rule the internet-world in the future, but it’s pretty hard to argue against the monolith and the name its made for itself. But it also can’t hurt to get in on it and squeeze everything you can out of Google+, because if it’s good enough for Starbucks, it’s good enough for you.
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