Lee Odden On SEO And The Social Web – OMS Minneapolis Keynote
Lee Odden, TopRank Online Marketing CEO gave the opening keynote of Online Marketing Peak Minneapolis. Lee spoke on the intersection of SEO and social media and provided key takeaways for companies on achieving success.
As the social web and search engines integrate and innovate tighter, the intersection between search and social is on the rise more meaningful daily. Following is a summation of this info-packed presentation:
What would happen if your Google traffic disappeared tomorrow? What impact would that have on your marketing and your business? For many, this could be disastrous. This highlights the substance of diversifying your brand’s referring sources and share of voice around the web.
Search and social are intersecting in many ways: when you look at a comparison of the top search engines, more and more of the engines themselves are on social platforms, and more of the results on the huge engines are social.
Reckon about amplifying the results you are getting from natural SEO by amplifying your content through social channels.
Google dominates search, but should it dominate your marketing?
Lee mutual some stats that help support the diversification of your traffic and digital influence:
- 90% of consumers entrust peer recommendations, according to Nielsen, but only 14% entrust advertisements according to Larry Weber
- Facebook added more than 200 million users in less than a year according to the Facebook timeline
- Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the US
- 2nd most well loved search engine isn’t Yahoo, it’s YouTube according to comScore
- 80% of companies use social media for recruitment, 95% of those are LinkedIn
The stats paint a apparent picture: that social is vital to integrate with search and your marketing program overall. According to SEMPO, 35% of B2B companies integrate social media and search engine marketing programs – is your brand?
HubSpot is a fantastic social/SEO example – they hear 20,000 leads a month from inbound efforts.
What about search and social as it integrates with PR and media relations? To research tales:
- 89% of journalists use blogs
- 65% use social networks
- 52% use Twitter
Jon Gordon from NPR prominent:
I use search engines on nearly every tale. I use social networks to find additional sources as well as for the tale thought generation and tale feedback.
How to leverage SEO for marketing and PR:
If you already have a keyword glossary, that can be mutual with PR to leverage for their content creation to be optimized for journalists.
How do SEO and social media intersect?
Add a layer of search to your social endeavor: are you leveraging keywords across your social web participation? If not, you should be. Give your keyword glossaries to your social media marketing and PR team to use across marketing efforts. Cumulatively this leads to better visibility not just in Google but in social search as well.
One of the problems of social media and SEO is that they are usually place in silos within an organization. But, you can bring them together to amplify results. You can’t meet the expense of not to combine social and SEO. In fact, if you are in a competitive category, it’s hard to compete if you aren’t engaged. As just one example, it’s hard to buy lots of high quality, organic links unless you can promote fantastic content to a significant number of people.
Ecommerce is social
Butt, 1-800 Flowers, and other e-commerce brands are going social. They are integrating their online purchasing with social sites in order to tap into networks along with purchasing. Companies that are doing this type of endeavor are training their customers to make social a part of the purchasing process.
Customer service is social
Large brands are leveraging social tools for CRM purposes and sales opportunities. All you need to do to see the opportunity is query a topic customers are seeking information on and you can be the one to respond.
Most importantly, people are social and people search. As long as there is content that can be sorted, there is an opportunity to optimize it.
Is social a threat to search? No – search isn’t going anywhere. Social sites are well loved but according to both consumer data and the nature of the web they are not a threat to search.
4 keys to Social SEO:
Listening, content, socialize, measurement
Listening – know the channels so you can make smart decisions about your tactics. Listening also provides you social keyword research to mine data from your butt consultation. If you have ever made a social listening report, you know it’s keyword-based and the value of understanding the language audiences use.
Content – The business that makes social or SEO fantastic is content. If you don’t have a fantastic message, you don’t have whatever business. Take stock of content assets in order to be able to maintain consistency with communications. After inventory, you can sync that up with an editorial plot. Skipping this step can lead to failure: for example, many make blogs and run out of things to say quite quickly. Without a plot, it’s simple to get stuck. Next, map your content to those social keywords developed to maximize visibility in search.
Socialize – give to get, and grow a network of relevant people. Even if you have fantastic content, no one will know to link to it or share it unless you promote it.
Delivery channels are essential – make content around the needs of your customers and send through delivery channels that are independent of Google – for example, RSS, email, social, media/PR and contributed articles. The kicker is if done effectively, your performance in Google skyrockets.
Cycle of social and SEO:
Measure – get social monitoring tools and social analytics in house in order to know and get feedback on your content and participation. Look at the performance of your content and your competition’s content in order to provide insight.
Marketo (a TopRank client) as an example made a social SEO strategy that focused on keywords and content their customer finds valuable as opposed to limiting themselves purely to keywords unfolding the product.
3 things you can do now:
1) Establish a listening program
2) Implement a content marketing strategy
3) Leverage social media marketing campaign management tools (which will be explored in a future post at TopRank Blog).
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