Creating Sales Messages Through Google+ Rel=”Publisher” Feature

I saw a couple of posts on rel=”publisher” of late, particularly on the implementation. This isn’t a post about that - Ben Helbrook has already been very comprehensive on State of Search.

I actually had the snippet implemented on Grazia Daily almost as soon as it was released (in Spring I think), but I wasn’t really aware of it’s function other to verify the link between the Google+  and the website, much in the same way author profiles link together. However, that post made me aware that your page can appear within relevant searches. I noticed ours wasn’t showing – I thought it was probably because the page was inactive, so we started updating (just pushing tweets to begin with) and it began to show up.

Cannibalizing the Real Estate

When it did show up I wasn’t very happy. A branded search is about as good as it can get in publishing – audiences who enter via branded search are always the most engaged. It irritated me a little that now a search for the brand could end up as a conversion for Google, and not necessarily a visit for our destination site. Of course, we might get a user into our circle and have them receive updates for us, but I still thought there was a bit of cannibalisation.

Instead of just building more Circles on Google+, which isn’t going to be particularly useful for us in the short term, we could use the slot as a kind of advert that promotes a product. So every week on a Tuesday, we update the cover and the tagline to be the same as the magazine promo slot on the homepage of our website. Now, rather than the Google+ page being about converting to Google and potentially taking traffic, it has a valuable sales message that some searchers might not otherwise see.

Search for ‘grazia’ – check it out:

Finally, a real use for Google+ other than SEO value! (There are others I know, I just haven’t got to them yet).