This isn’t a top 10 post, or a 5 reasons to do blah post.
No. It is none of that attention grabbing nonsense.
Here is one simple reason that all businesses, big or small need to be on Google+. Oh and by that I mean, need to be active on Google+. I shall explain by way of a real life experience I happened to have this morning.
Brand searches on Google
Question: What is the first thing people do when they want to find out about a particular business?
Answer: They use a search engine to do a brand search. In the majority of cases, they use Google Search.
That is exactly what I did this morning. I wanted to find out about a local ‘gastropub’, because there is an event that I am supposed to be going to in a few days and I wanted information about it. I typed in the business name into Google Search and…
I was dismayed to find they have no website.
Instead, I found they have a Google+ page. It is in the number one spot on page one of Google for the search term I used. However, this is what I found when I clicked on it.
Now, I am not that mean, so I will not name and shame them here (hence the blurring in the image above). I did find the information eventually, but only because I guessed they had a Facebook page and found them on there.
It stands as a lesson to all businesses. People use search engines to search and if you are not actively making your content available to the search engines, you are making a serious mistake.