How to Create And Optimise a Google+ Page

Hi it's Jake here from the weblinx team, now I'm making this video today because we've received a lot of enquiries regarding social media, particularly with Google+. This is because it is quite a new social network in the grand scale of things. Now this video is going to teach you how to create and then optimise a Google+ business page. So to begin with, let's go to Google. So once you're on Google, it'll look something like this. Now I'm already signed in but to get to Google+, I can just go on this little "+Jake" here so I click on that and it will take me to my own personalised Google+ feed. From here, to create a business profile, you go right down to this right hand part here to create a Google+ page So once I've clicked on this, it will take me to something similar to this. This is where the optimisation really starts because it depends on what kind of businesss you have and what kind of terms you want to target as to what kind of category you want your created page to be. For example, if you were targeting local terms and you were a local business, then you'd pick the top one here - "Local businesses and places". But for the purpose of this example, we're going to go with this - "Company, Institution or Organisation". So once I click on this, it brings up the information section. You want to add your page name, so for the purpose of this video, we're going to call it "Example SEO" and pretend it's a company called Example that provides SEO services. It's always best to add a website when you can so if we were to add the adress as "http://www.exampleseo.com". It's quite important that you get the category right. So it depends on what your industry is obviously. So if it's an SEO company, then you would probably be looking for "internet and software." Now an important feature in Google+ is to always make sure that your profiles are visible to everybody. That's if you're creating it for exposure, which we are. I'd leave that so that it will be visible to any Google+ user, although if you are offering specific services catered more towards adults, then you should change this. As you can see, this is why you should because different companies have different laws of things like drinking alcohol. We're going to leave it as just "anyone" because SEO is suitable for anyone. So once you've clicked that and agreed to the terms, you click create. Now the profile's starting to be created now. We've got to start with what's known as the "Tagline". This is displayed just under the company name and should be something that's catchy, something that's more promotional than optimised to bring in the customers. For our tagline, we'll leave it as something like "Here at Example SEO, your success is our success." So it's something nice, short, sweet and catchy, yet it has "SEO" in the title. So if we were a real SEO company, if Example was a real SEO company, then that would be a keyword they would be targeting, so it's always good to include it in your profile. Now the next thing we need to do is add a profile picture, which couldn't be more simple. Once you've clicked that button, you've got this box here. What I usually do is just as it says really, drag an image over to it. If you don't want to drag one, you could select it and then browse through your computer but I find this way to be easier. Once it's uploaded, you'll want to crop it to the right dimensions to make sure that all of the image is shown. Usually this profile picture would be a company logo or something similar. We'll add the caption of well, exactly that, we'll put "Example SEO Company Logo." Once you've set that as your profile picture, you can move on, you just have to click continue. This is where you get the opportunity to spread the word and share with your circles everything to do with your profile page really. You could put in a personalised message or you could just click "share on Google+" and it will share it from your profile, with a link to the new business page that you've created. I'm not going to do that in this example because I wouldn't want to share a business page that's not going to be there in 10 minutes. Once you've done that, you click "finish". The first thing I usually do when creating profiles is to get the Google+ badge. You get this badge to display it on your website. This is the default layout for the Google+ badge. There's a lot of parameters that you can alter to make it your own and make it fit in with your website. To start with, I'm not going to have it in Arabic because I'm based in the UK. So I'll change this to English. Right now you can change it from the standard size, which will appear to be about that big. Or you could make it a smaller badge, or you could even just make it as big as an icon. For this, we'll use the standard badge. For the developers out there, you have these advanced options that let you even further define what you want your badge to look like. You can actually alter the size, the colour themes. You can have it as light as it's displayed there, or you can have it as dark. That would depend on the layout and style of your website entirely. You should always leave this box ticked. If you have an HTML5 site, then it might be worth ticking this box. That's because it's going to add it in HTML 5 valid syntax. This is the code for your actual badge. It is more for the development side. You'll want to grab from here, to here and place this is the tag of your website. Either in your template, or whichever individual page you want the badge to appear on. Once you've done that, you get this part of the code. Then copy and paste that into where on your website you want the badge to be displayed. Simple enough really. So once you've got the code and added it to your site, you can carry on with optimising your profile page. Now that we've created it, we can go to the profile and you can do that by clicking on the name here, or this little icon here. Click on the name and it will take you to this page. As you can see, it's quite empty at this time but that will change. We'll go to "Edit Profile" at the top. To begin with, we'll add an introduction. As it says here, "put a little about your page here so people will know they've found the correct Example SEO." So that can be anything really, it's doesn't have to be too long but it is advised to do quite a bit, but not too much. So let's say "This is the Google+ page for Example SEO, a professional SEO and Internet marketing company based in Blackburn." Something that's nice, short, sweet and sticks to the point really. It gives enough description so whoever's on the page will realise what this kind of page is straight away. After you save that, you move down to contact info. It's important to put as many of these in as you can. As you can see, there's a little box here that says "phone", once you click this, a drop down box appears with all these different contact options. As I've already said, it's important to add as many of these as you can because not only is that better for the end user, because it's giving more ways to contact you, but it's better for Google because Google just like as much detail as possible on this front. For this, we'll add the Weblinx number that's "01254 267360". Aside from that, you can add more mobile numbers or email addresses. Once you've added an email address, you can go on to the page and you should actually get it verified. To do that, you click next to the email adress because there's a little tick and then it'll send the email address an email with a verification link. Once you've clicked that, your email is verified. A verified email will always look better than an unverified one. The address is something that is extremely important if you're targeting local terms and going for local SEO so once again, I'll use the Weblinx details. It's the "Blackburn Technology Centre, Challenge Way, Blackburn, BB1 5QB." Once I've added that, I'll click "save". Where you entered the website earlier, is being displayed here. It's worth mentioning that with Google+ unlike a lot of other social networks, the links that are displayed on any profiles are all followed links. Which means that the Google spiders will actually follow them and crawl the pages that they're attached to. A very very useful tool. If you can see this recommended links section here, this is supposed to be links that this profile is recommending. This is used for a lot of different types of links. We use it for our social media links so we've linked our other social media accounts to this page and also our blog links. For the purpose of example, we'll just add a link to the Weblinx Blog. The label is the text that will appear in front of the link. So if we're linking to the Weblinx Blog, we'll make the label as relevant as possible and just call it "The Weblinx Blog.". next you enter the URL If you wanted to add more, you just click "add custom link" so you can add as many as you like. Although it's worth being cautious because if you add too many links and they're all irrelevant, people might not like it as much and it might not give you the interest you're looking for. Once you've saved that, this is where you start to add a bit more personalisation to your profile. If you can see this top along here, this is known as "The Scrapbook Photos" This stores 5 photos across here and can be used for anything from adding a team page, to a graph, to loads of things really. We'll click on this just to show you how it works and how they're uploaded. So once you've clicked on that, it comes up here "Add a Photo". So click on that and it works in the same way that it did when we were adding the profile picture. We'll just drag a picture across and upload it. If you've noticed, it's on public. You can change these settings but we're going to leave it on public, thus to increase exposure. You can carry on and add up to 5 photos on here. We're just going to add 1. So after you click continue, you can see how it is displayed. Next is adding photos. This works in the exact same way. If you're on "Edit Profile" and you go on to the photos tab, it'll give you a variety of options you can use to change how Google detects photos of me. This isn't as useful with business pages as it is with personal pages because a lot of it is because of this option, the "Find my face in photos and prompt people I know to tag me." option. This is because if you're a company, you don't really have a face. We'll click finished editing because the "About Us" is done To upload photos, you go to "photos", and simply go on "upload new photos". This is where you get to design an album name. A lot of companies would use this for, well it depends entirely on what industry you're in. So if you're a web design company, you might upload an album entitled "Web Design Portfolio" where you only upload images of the websites you've designed. It works in the exact same way as whenever you've uploaded anything else. You just drag a file into the area and it uploads. It works in the exact same way for videos. You can even create albums for videos as well. Right now we're coming into circles, now Google+ have made circles in replace of friends or followers on Twitter. The aim of circles is to sort of be a hybrid between Facebook friends and Twitter followers. This is because they are 'friends' but people can add other people and follow them without actually having to have had them in their friends already. We'll go on circles now. As you can see, Google have already given us 4 circles to add people to so that's "Following", "Customers", "VIPs" and "Team Members". Now following, that kind of circle would be just for, like on Twitter when people follow celebrities and such. It might not be people we personally know but you might be interested in their posts. Then you have your customers, which is pretty self explanetory. Then you've got the VIPs and Team Members. To create a new circle for something specific you want, just hover over this far left circle called "Create a circle". For the purpose of the video, we'll call it business partnerships. So once you've typed in the name of the circle, you click "create empty circle". Now we've done this, you can see it appearing right here. But how do we add someone to it? Well I'll show you. With Google+, unlike other social networks, if you're a business page, you can't add people or personal pages without them already adding you first. But you can add other businesses. So this is why I've searched for Weblinx. If I was to go in to the Weblinx profile, see up here there's a little red box that says "follow" If you highlight over that, a drop box will appear Simply choose which circle to add them to. So if I add them to the business partnerships, it tells you what happens and how it communicates. And also what they will see and what you will see etc. Okay I've got that. Now you can see it's turned green and says business partnerships. That's because it's in our business partnerships circle. The thing about Google+ is you can add people to more than one circle which makes sense really. You could have a customer that you're following because you're interested in their posts. Now you can see that it says "2 circles". This can be for as many circles as you have. If we're to go back to circles here, we can see that now we've added Weblinx, There's 1 in the business partnerships and when you click on the circle, it goes up here and opens. This is so you can see in this circle that there is just one - Weblinx. From here you can edit the circle so that's changing the name or adding a description. I'll put "These are our SEO Business Partnerships." As you can see, I've also took this opportunity to include the keyword once again. it's just little things like this, little subtleties that really help you be successful on Google+. Next I'll save that. From this menu, you can also, after editing it, share the circle. So if you've got a circle that you want to share with your friends and say that "Look this list of people are great, add them." then that's how you can do it. Or if you've fallen out with a load of people, you can just delete the full circle and that's all of them gone. Now that's pretty much it in terms of what you can do to your page. So let's see one that's already been done - Weblinx. We've gone for the team approach across the top so we've added 5 profiles of our team along this. So you've got Craig the MD, Nadz the Director, Me an Internet Marketing Developer, Marcus a Social Media Strategist and Adam, our Technical manager. So we've just got them across the top, just to add a more personal feel, if you can see some of our posts down there. If you go to the "About Us", you can see that we've filled this out. We've also added our recommended links. This is what a finished profile would look like. Now with Google+, you don't have to just have one person in control of the profile. To give other people admin capabilities, all you need to do is go back to home as I've just clicked and click the little arrow again.. Then you go down to "Manage Your Pages". Once you've clicked that it'll bring up this so you go to the page you want to manage and click "settings" There's a variety of things you can change on this page so as previously mentioned keep it as public as possible, you want to make sure that everyone can see your page. Make it get out there so you can actually get some conversions from it. So there's also a variety of other little things you can change in here such as when Google will notify you basically. It's up to the individual how much they want to be notified by Google or it depends onhow much they check on the account. To add other admin capabilities, you go down to "Managers" here on the left. Then it's just simply that so to give someone else admin capabilities, you just enter an email address. Now I'm going to add Adam at work. All you need to do is type in an email address and click invite. Then he'll get that email and he'll be able to follow a link through and manage the page like I do. That's all there really is to it. If you ever feel as though you want to delete a profile page you've made, it's really simple. All you need to do is go in to the general settings again and scroll right down to the bottom where it says "Delete page". Because this was only an example profile, we don't really want Google to register it, we are going to delete this now. Now that's done, we're done. If you have any questions or anything, please don't hesitate to email or call. We'll be more than happy to help. Thank you for listening