With the recent increase in importance of social signals, it is important for SEO to also integrate an SMO strategy with the intention to increase quality traffic and desired results. This leads to our first section in the thesis with the following subtopic.
Now there is a direct correlation between SMO and SEO. When a web page gets posted on a social media site, it can act like a web page and also get indexed by the search engine. In 2010, it was confirmed by both Google and Bing that links shared through Facebook and Twitter have a direct impact on search engine ranking results. Now, it is believed that with the recent Panda update, Google is looking for higher quality data on the website, and there are also indications for future usage of social signals as representation for a trustworthy site. This change will be beneficial for SMO, as better quality content will improve the likelihood of social sharing and also increase inbound availability to the site.
The recent explosion of social media sites such as Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Pinterest, and many more has created huge amounts of data. Sites such as Facebook include data from individuals that includes information about themselves and what they like. This data stored in user profiles can be hugely beneficial to marketers and can be a factor in landing a sale, resulting in the realization by savvy business brands that there is much to be gained from being socially engaging and also the content which gets posted with the primary motive of capturing attention from the audience. It is stated that “the ideal strategy here is to simply escalate one’s digital self by collecting a high-value audience and portray the brand as being the best choice,” with the end result of driving traffic to the brand’s website. If this can be done successfully, it will increase the chances of desired conversion, which results in an increase of ROI.
The thesis is structured in the following way. Firstly, there is an introduction section which outlines the growing importance of the social signals on the search engine rankings, and then there is an insight on social media optimization and its benefits in the context of SEO. As social media and search engine optimization are highly interconnected, never before has it been so essential for a marketer to utilize search engines in order to gain visibility onto its products or services.
Importance of Social Signals in SEO
As stated by Rohit Bhargava, the original concept of SMO was primarily focused on driving traffic from sources other than search engines, through content sharing on social media and networking sites. While the concept remains unchanged, the implications of SMO on driving organic traffic have become all the more prevalent. This is because SMO is not only about sharing content and products on various social networking sites, it’s also about making that content more visible through searching with social media and sharing tools.
A social signal is a measure of social media activity, such as a vote, share, or other engagement that search engines might count as a form of endorsement for a webpage. With the increase in popularity of social media, it is no surprise that the search engine’s utilization of these signals is becoming more deeply ingrained. In a study released by Forrester, they concluded that 51% of all internet users in the US have joined a social network. This is a huge leap from 2008 where that figure was at 25%. The study also makes note of the fact that the age range of 35-54, which is typically associated with higher income households, using social media more than any other age group. This demonstrates that the audience of casual internet browsers, who are more likely to click ads or spend money online are being reached more now through social media. With these statistics in mind, it is easy to see why 82% of marketers surveyed by Ad-ology said that they want to learn more about how to market on social networks. These marketers can do so by enabling social signals through Social Media Optimization (SMO).
The search engine landscape has evolved drastically over the years. Keywords are no longer the only means of generating traffic to a website. Search engines now reward websites that produce quality content, that are getting constantly shared, voted, and recommended by others. This shift on the search engine’s part has made many internet marketers and business owners question whether or not SEO is still a relevant strategy in online marketing. Using social signals as a means of ranking websites in search engines is an emerging trend and is becoming more and more prevalent.
Benefits of Social Media Optimization
Well, the first one is improving brand loyalty. As we know, social media for these recent years has turned out to be more than just a place to connect with family and friends. In fact, many people are using a variety of social media to find information. Based on studies that have been done by MarketingSherpa, 36% of people prefer to use social media to learn about brands and this number is increasing. This means that people will find your brand information through social media. And if you have informative social media and provide a solution for those who were informed something, then indirectly people will find what they are looking for, and of course, they will be very possible to your site. Now, when they’ve come to your site, they will see the things that have made your brand in social media, and it will make them realize that your site really does belong to the brand that they are looking for. And the possibilities to revisit your website will be greater, right? When someone often comes to your site, this means that it has been on the right track in cultivating brand loyalty. And he wasn’t the only one because brand loyalty is closely related to trust and the possibility of customers to the brand. This is great, right? So by simply optimizing your social media, it will give an enormous impact on the site. Step in increasing brand loyalty will also be directly related to sales, where in MarketingSherpa study states that there is a 62% effectiveness of the increase in sales of a company by enhancing the brand’s social media. So the conclusion of the first point is if increasing the brand loyalty with social media optimization, it will affect the increase in traffic and the possibility of new customers.
Strategies for Social Media Optimization
Engaging with social media influencers 2% of individuals are responsible for sharing 80% of the brand-related stories online. Identifying and engaging with those individuals is therefore vital to amplifying your brand’s social media optimization. This can be achieved through these simple steps: Identify key influencers in your brand’s target market. Use authority tools to discover who shares the same brand or product type. These may be bloggers, reviewers, or even public figures. Your aim is to find individuals who have a large influence over your ideal consumers.
Creating high-quality content Content is the driving force in social media, and original, creative material creates a lasting impression. When content is created with the intention of receiving links and attention, your return on investment will be far greater. This can involve a vast array of material, from written articles to viral videos. Whatever it may be, it is important that it has the following qualities:
- Relevancy – content has to be closely related to your business/brand and should be targeted towards your customer.
b. Linkability – when good content is created, people will want to link to it, thus creating more links to your website.
c. Maybe it’s a bit controversial? – although this can be risky, creating content that expresses a strong opinion has the potential to go viral.
d. Keep it fresh – content that is updated frequently is perceived as a good investment. A blog or Twitter feed is a perfect way to keep content up to date.
e. Value – Is your content of value? Whether it be entertainment or information, it needs to provide something.
Creating High-Quality Content
Creating great micro-content for social media can be a lot of fun. Rather than traditional blog posts, articles or guides – you can think outside the square and get as creative as you can with your ideas. Videos, infographics and top ten lists are extremely popular and can indirectly boost your brand’s linkability and overall recognition. Writing this type of content can be great for attracting a specific audience and eventually turning them into customers.
Producing high quality, compelling, contagious content is one of the best ways to increase your linkbait. Often when something is funny or controversial, it can be picked up by social media and spread like wildfire across the internet. People will link to it from their own content, increasing the amount of natural links.
Different from the content of your website, which is created and remains static, social media is all about micro-content. Your challenge here is creating constant, quality micro-content that will keep the rest of the web wanting to link to it. This is a prerequisite to successful link building.
Engaging with Social Media Influencers
It’s also important to be transparent with the influencer about what you expect in your promotional agreement and what key messages you would like conveyed. You should also build a joint-strategy with the influencer being involved in some of the decision making as they know their audience best. This form of promotion can essentially be reaching out to only one person for a product endorsement deal, but the difference is you have that person promote your product to their audience in a way that doesn’t come off as a hard-sell. Formerly, the most popular method of influencer marketing was utilizing bloggers who would write a sponsored (paid) review for a product. With the rise in popularity of YouTube and video-based content, an increasingly popular method is having a YouTube personality use the product in a video, either as the focus of the video or whilst giving commentary in the form of a Let’s Play or tutorial video.
Influencer marketing is the concept of partnering with popular bloggers and social media personalities to have them use or talk about your products. The idea behind this concept is to gain credibility and awareness with your target audience. On top of this, with social media’s growing popularity, a tweet or a post from an influencer can mean a mention of your brand to thousands or even millions of people. There are some things to consider when engaging in influencer marketing, such as the fact that paying an influencer can hinder the image of authenticity with their recommendation, therefore if you have a good product, sometimes it’s better to let them try it for free.
Leveraging User-Generated Content
It has been said that an action of a member of the collective intelligence might not be rational from the point of view of his individual good, yet the intelligent system makes use of the action for proper coordination among individuals. The intelligent system referred to here is a search engine; the success that someone experiences in accomplishing a task such as the coordination of a group of people to build an online encyclopedia comes about from the ease of access that the information provides. If said task and information can be found and the actions can be influenced, it is considered a success for search engines with respect to information retrieval. A classic example in recent times is the increase in PageRank and subsequent indexing of content from weblogs result from events at the political convention in America. User-generated content is that which is written by individuals who are not professional writers and is the sort of information that individuals can use to help them complete tasks. This is a stark contrast to information readily available within enterprises, something that search engines are all too aware of. With the increase into knowledge management, search engines have become a necessary tool for helping enterprises to better access and leverage their information, so it should be no surprise that companies producing content to help search engines will Six Apart taxable on the notion.
If the first of the above two forces driving Web 2.0 is using the internet as a platform for harnessing the intelligence of groups, user-generated content is the embodiment of that intelligence. Ideas surrounding user-generated content have forced companies to rethink their traditional intellectual property and knowledge management strategies. However, it is widely recognized that success today requires unfettered access to information and the ability to act on it. So while it may seem vain to try and leverage something that is often created for pure enjoyment content, traditional or not, it is an important resource and one that will become a more important aspect of strategic planning in the future.
Utilizing Hashtags and Keywords
The essential activities of Twitter mean that it is important to recycle tweets that contain your keywords at different times. One method of recycling tweets and increasing user engagement is the opposed use of scheduled tweets. A second method that also applies to social media content on other platforms is the sharing and resharing of content. This can be done through content sharing between social media users or directly from one social media platform to another. A third method is participating in online events that are related to your keywords. Such events often have their own hashtags and can result in increased visibility of your social media content.
As part of the process of web page and keyword optimization, it is important to make sure that the keywords or phrases that you want to rank for in search engines are also used in social media content. It is especially important to use these keywords in the content that you produce on your own social media pages.
Hashtags are an important part of social media optimization and make your content easier to find for social media users. Hashtags are unique in the sense that they can be used in content across multiple social networks. It is important to block your keywords and key phrases into a hashtag format. It is important to use hashtags in moderation. Social media posts that are laden with hashtags are off-putting to users. As a general rule, two or three hashtags per post is a good target to maximize the findability of your content.
Measuring the Impact of Social Signals on SEO
To measure the impact of Facebook shares, tweets or +1s on search engine rankings, it is imperative to first track social media metrics. A variety of tools can be utilized for this purpose. Twitter, for example, has its own analytics platform providing data on tweets including impressions, engagements, and engagement rates such as retweets. Additionally, URLProfiler has just launched a tool designed to extract information from around 11 different sources including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+. Data includes shares, likes, tweets, followers, and more. This service costs $10 a month and so far has proven to be much cheaper than alternative tools for gathering social data. If this tool does not suit, there are a number of paid and free options to choose from including Moz, CognitiveSEO, and Search Metrics. Data typically includes social page/domain activity, internal and external page activity, and comparisons with competitors. It is important to consider that each tool provides different types of data, and so varying tests may be required to discover which pieces of data are most relevant to social signals in SEO service and which are most useful for accurately predicting online success. Once tools have been tested and data starts to collect, the next step is to analyze website traffic and rankings to discover trends between social media metrics and changes in search engine rankings.
Tracking Social Media Metrics
Social network analysis is the process of gathering data from internet-based social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. Social network analysis is based on an approach in which a relationship among social entities is analyzed in order to explain particular social behaviors. V.K Narayanan and Georgios Koudinov have described a social entity as “a distinctive unit of analysis of a social network. Examples of social entities include individuals, groups, organizations, and entire societies. Social network analysis focuses on the interrelationships among units, and looks for the emergent properties of the whole system”. For an individual who is using social media as part of their marketing strategy, there are many potential uses of a social network analysis. Typically, social network analysis is used in the literature as a mapping and measuring tool and is used by practitioners to connect on a professional level and to evaluate the extent of their marketing and/or personal activities with regards to generating publicity. Social network analysis can also be used to allow a strategic visualization of the overall extent of a marketing campaign to a target audience in flooring industries. This visualization can also help the marketer to understand impact on node behaviors within the network. This can lead to an understanding of a more effective method in future marketing strategy. Coming to an understanding of preferential attachment is also a potential outcome of social network analysis utilization. This would be a very effective way to evaluate a network behavior at a local level which should be used to focus on target audience. By understanding local network behavior, an individual can use their resources and advancement to capture areas of rapid growth to maximize impact on a target audience and enhance brand image. For the duration of running a marketing strategy through a social network, the need to evaluate and understand the method for effective dispersal of information with relation to not wasting undue effort is vital to an individual to maximize impact while minimizing cost. The final reasoning for using social network analysis as a marketing practitioner is to evaluate a ROI (return on investment). This would be seeking to gauge a comparison of the money and resources put into the strategy against the resulting effects over time. This is a deciding factor at many stages of the strategy. If the strategy has had little effect for a given amount of resources put in, one may consider discontinuing the strategy, choosing to higher efficiency an alternate strategy, or even to cease marketing efforts to focus elsewhere. An understanding of the method for each of these decisions will also help to decide whether the investment in a few marketing strategies may be going beyond the expected and into the realms of overspending.
Analyzing Website Traffic and Rankings
Google webmaster tools provides great data on how your site ranks for specific keywords, the average position in search engine results, the impressions (how many search results showed your site) and the click through rate for the specific keyword. This data can be compared before and after specific social media efforts as the social media optimization campaign progresses, to gauge their impact on SEO. The last method to measure SEO includes tools such as Rank Tracker which provides tracking for keyword rankings in various search engines. With any keyword rank tracking, it is key to relate an increase in keyword rank to an increase in organic search traffic to a specific landing page, so that improvements can be tied directly to page and website authority.
There are several ways to analyze website traffic and rankings. When you first start your social media optimization campaign, you will want to establish a baseline of key performance indicators (KPIs). This includes website traffic that originates from social media networks, search engines, and inbound links. Measure the rate of each channel, compare it to previous data, and set goals and analysis times to ensure success. This data can be collected with any web analytics tool, but Google Analytics is a free tool that provides a large amount of data that can be compared to other data within the tool such as keyword rankings. Any increase in traffic source from a search engine can be tied to a social signal, as social media efforts help to improve organic search results. Use specific visitor segmentation to compare new visitors to returning ones and to compare visitor trends from before the social media optimization campaign to after.
Monitoring Social Engagement and Shares
When you execute a social networking campaign that you hope will affect your site’s SEO, the first thing that you will do is to ensure that the new content that you are promoting is actually being shared on the social networks. The simplest way to monitor this is just to search for the URL of your content on the social networks. Any likes or shares of the content will also result in more inbound links from the social networks. Keep track of how often your content has been liked or shared on various social networks, and compare that to the rate at which the actual URL was shared.
To track social signals all the way to their impact on SEO keywords, you need to know how they’re affecting website traffic and search engine rankings. This means monitoring on-site changes in both traffic and search rankings, and relating those changes to increases in social engagement (likes, shares) with specific content. Unfortunately, monitoring visitor traffic sources and changes in search engine ranks over specific social engagement events isn’t something you can easily do with an off the shelf analytics package. Key in a comprehensive social tracking and monitor the impact with these following methods.
Undoubtedly, social signals have a positive impact on search engine rankings. The question is not if Google will use social signals for SEO, it is when. Webmasters want to make social media websites have enough authority so that their links and social data will be valued as much as organic and sponsored search results. It is clear that there is a need to go back to the social media optimization drawing board to rethink how to best leverage social media sites. Social signals are growing more and more and are not taking a step back, so it’s time for SEOs to get on board (if they are not already) and brand marketers need to be ready to build their brand where their customers are. Social media provides an area to connect and many companies can do this through their website and social media. This will make customers and potential customers more connected, which can be done through social plugins on websites and engaging users in social media. Because of the rise of social and real-time data, there has been a shift in Google and Bing’s search results. This shift will have an impact on brands and companies who are accustomed to conventional marketing and SEO tactics. It is no longer just about optimizing a website to drive traffic, and this new era in search is very similar to the past when advertisers would use a strategy to place themselves in printed media and hope that readers would see their ad and information. This poses an interesting issue because social media is where most consumers are spending their time on the internet, and companies will need to adopt a strategy to shift some of their marketing to social media to keep up with their audience. This can be done through content that is distributed through social media that can influence consumers and users to share and link to.
