A pertinent question that has been doing the rounds recently is this – how important is Google+ to search engine ranking? It is easy to assume that since Google+ is a product of Google, it obviously means that the social site will have some if not full impact on search engine rankings. For veterinary practices the benefits of Google+ include not only greater opportunity to increase their online presence but also opportunity to enhance Google ranking for their veterinary practice.

Can Google+ help in building your veterinary practice brand?

Google+ is a social platform and as such offers veterinary practices marketing and branding opportunities similar to those offered by other social media giants such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn among others. In addition to this, Google+ is a Google product, so it goes without saying that this social media platform can be a highly effective marketing and promotional tool if used correctly.

Let us look at some of the more obvious ways in which Google+ can help veterinary practices build their brand.

Faster Crawling and Indexing of Web Pages

Since 2011, Twitter has denied Google access to its data. Facebook has done the same by setting up privacy settings and by restricting sharing of data. Because of this Google has been using Google+ to find new content. In fact, because of this, URLs that are shared on Google+ are not only found by search engine spiders much faster, but the indexing of these URLs is much faster.  In short, Google+ data can be accessed immediately by Google unlike the data of other social media platforms.

Faster link equity sculpting of Google+ posts

Pages and posts on Google+ not only benefit from PageRank, but since links to posts are followed, they clear link equity easily.  So anytime you share a link on Google+, the anchor text is viewed as the title of the shared page. However, keep in mind the following –

• Only “shared” links (links which show up beneath your post) will be followed; any other external links that you include in the body of your post are nofollowed. This means they will not clear link equity.
• Again, uploaded images will not pass external link equity; they can however, help in increasing post popularity and click-through rate.
• Specific links in your Google+ “About” page are followed and will clear link equity.

Each shared post on Google+ is a mini blog in the making

• Each shared post on Google+ offers the following advantages
• A separate URL
• First 45-50 characters of the post will appear in the title tag
• Similar to a blog post, entries on Google+ can be comprehensive
• Anytime a post is re-shared, it collects internal links from Google+

All of these capabilities work together to improve rankings in Google’s search results in addition to sending relevance signals to a URL which is shared by the post.

Build Author Rank and Publisher Rank

Although Google has not made it clear how relevant Author Rank will be when it comes to ranking websites, if you develop content then you need to start preparing for Author Rank. Here is what you can do – Go to the “Contributor” section of the G+ profile page and add the URL’s of all the places where you have published your content; do not add the homepage link, but the actual published URL. This will not only clear link equity, but also because searches today show author image in results, this will help in validating your expertise in your area of specialization.