Setting up Google+ Business Page for SEO purposes

[JesterMagic]

For SEO purposes I decided to setup authorship on my blog posts and have a few questions...

1) Should I create a new Google+ account or just use my personal one? I rather not mix my personal with business (and vice versa) so do the privacy settings for pages offer enough settings to keep things seperated or not really?

2) Is the category for the page important? The website the page is for, is a forum and review site on an online industry. It is about a number of product and brands so would my category be:

Product or Brand -> Website

or should I choose the Other category? Is this really important and is it something I can change later?

[mihomes]

I may be wrong, but I am pretty sure you 'must' setup a profile for yourself as an individual and then the 'business page' would be a page under you.

Don't quote me on that, but when I originally setup my pages this is the same thing I was wondering. I would much rather not have myself personally linked, but rather have the company as the acting voice per se. At the moment my pages are under my own profile, but in all honestly it works very similar to Facebook where you don't know the person behind the scenes unless you choose to do so.

[Tiggerito]

Linking yourself as an Author will mean your profile will show up with those website pages. No privacy there.

Google has not been clear on how to deal with your sort of situation. I think having an alternate profile for work will be fine.

Google Pages are a separate thing. It is not publicly shown who owns a page so you can safely create one and keep your profile private from it.

Pages cannot be authors but they can be publishers. At this time the page can be linked to a website and the +1s will get combined.

[ColourOfSpring]

As Eric Schmidt has said quite a few times, the price for anonymity is irrelevance. You have to put yourself up front and centre for everything if you want to play Google's game. That means Google author profiles even if it's for your business and the "author" is not really actually relevant to the reader.

[aristotle]

What do you mean by "for SEO purposes". Are you talking about your main site? I really don't see how creating a Google+ page could improve the intrinsic value and usefulness of your main site. It's like saying you're going to improve your house by building a little shack somewhere else.

[ColourOfSpring]

I really don't see how creating a Google+ page could improve the intrinsic value and usefulness of your main site. It's like saying you're going to improve your house by building a little shack somewhere else.

Exactly. Not only that, but you're diluting your focus, energy and actual message across several platforms if you play the "social" game. I can imagine big brands using social well, but not so sure about smaller companies. You see them tweeting away useless updates, check their site out and it looks utterly abandoned and unloved. I can see how they could put their time and effort to better use than be "social". I know companies that sell strict B2B items like screws, industrial glue and fridge spares - and they've been advised to setup Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ pages because "everyone else is doing it, don't be left behind".

[JesterMagic]

I completely agree ColourOfSpring. Except for maybe Twitter, having a Facebook page and Google+ page is just diluting things. I much rather have all interactions on my site.

The problem is my traffic is dropping and I need to find other sources and hopefully improve my rankings. I would bet that having a Google+ page along with authorship and a Facebook page helps determine rankings.

[netmeg]

None of my users are on Google+ (and probably never will be) but I still maintain a page for each site, for authorship/publisher reasons, and in case something changes in the future. It doesn't cost anything other than the time to set it up, and tools are starting to come out now that post directly to these pages. I don't know if it will help rankings; my rankings are pretty good now, but I do notice that if I have a recent post to the Google+ page, certain queries will show my page and logo over in the Knowledge Graph spot, and that's a huge eye catching result, so if they're doing that, I'm gonna take advantage. It doesn't show up for every query or every site, and maybe they'll take it away, but for now, I'm there.

(Facebook is a different matter; my users are all over Facebook and they share and bring more users to the site. Plus I can treat the FB page fans like an email mailing list)

[JesterMagic]

@netmeg do you have an individual google+ account for each site?

[netmeg]

Nope, they're all tied to my own account. I'd be stupid not to leverage that because I've been around since the dinosaurs. But I don't give out a whole lot of information there, either.

[aristotle]

for SEO purposes

Is this the main reason why most people join Google+, because they're hoping to use it "for SEO purposes"?

[Lexur]

Is this the main reason why most people join Google+, because they're hoping to use it "for SEO purposes"?

Yes. That's the only reason I do it.
I have a page for every website and my personal profile is linked to my prefesional blog.
I simply paste the news of the sites to the G+ pages via RSS.

This is like to have a blog on Blogger: yes, it's BS but a very well ranked BS.

[ColourOfSpring]

I simply paste the news of the sites to the G+ pages via RSS.

So your G+ pages will have content that is 100% duplicate...? I'm not sure that's what Google would want...even if it's "no, they're just snippets of the news with links to the articles" - it's just AN Other news aggregator page with no original content on it - an unnecessary step to the actual content itself, unless Google view the aggregation in and of itself as having value.

[Lexur]

As per stats, Google views "the aggregation in and of itself as having value" while you do it for its own audience.
Actually, I don't think the Google engineers view any value there, technically speaking, but there is business rules that overwrite any kind of do-not-evilness and push in the SERPS the influence of G+, Blogger, Youtube and other Google Inc. properties.

[G_K_Gupta]

You should create a different Google+ account to part with Professional and personal purpose as it never mixes the two and you can handle the both easily.

Category is important as you and others can easily differentiate the purpose of the page.

[Lexur]

You should create a different Google+ account to part with Professional and personal purpose

Only if you use social networks for personal purposes, of course.

[Str82u]

@JesterMagic, by now you've gone through all this but as my 2¢ - social pages are good for SEO if you USE them and it comes in a few forms; as a disclaimer: SEO here means getting involved with real people. I do the PAGE pages (not personal profiles) on all social networks per site, no mixing there. Before anyone criticizes the effort about to be described, the outcome should be that value is added to the website by the webmaster acting AS the website socially. Not all sites need it like this.

You can't be your only fan/follower reposting your own stuff from your personal profiles and other pages; you have to get engagement working for you and that means

1. learning those different audiences
   
2. "making friends" that are actually interesting to your niche, receptive to your messages and potential promoters (and maybe something to promote for others)
   
3. sharing posts and information that are interesting and not always promotional, etc.

No lie, it's work to deal with it that way and hard for me to divide time finding something of quality to "share" per site (most Pages don't get the attention the website deserves). Some folks automate the process but I find doing it manually lets me see the incoming stream of people in #2 because they might offer some news or something you want to pass along.

Is all that necessary? No. Not all social sites are useful. To me Pinterest is pretty useless and pointless without real interaction but even there I'll post things that the Website's audience might find interesting including photos from some articles from each website.

Blah, blah, that's my 2¢.

EDIT: maybe this is more helpful: Our busiest site has a particular audience it attracts, about 2% of those visitors I want to work with on a slightly different level. Using social networks the SITE is able to reach out to those types of people directly who in turn interact with more people like them both socially and in their physical world.