How Social Media Has Revolutionized Search Marketing
As consumers have become increasingly entrenched in social networks, search engines have inserted social signals into their ranking algorithms and marketers have revamped their strategies and revised their budgets to include social channels like Twitter and Facebook. On Wednesday, June 1, 2011 Optify and Search Marketing Now (SMN) held a joint webcast, examining how social media is influencing search marketing and offering insights on which actions marketers need to take to leverage this relationship. Speakers Eric Enge, President of Stone Temple Consulting, and Erez Barak, VP of Products and Co-Founder at Optify, led an in-depth discussion about social’s direct impact on the evolving search landscape. Following the discussion, audience members were invited to participate in a Q&A with the speakers.
To learn more, check out these resources:
- Watch the webinar presentation
- Read our blog post, What Does the Future of Social Search Look Like?
- Check out our webinar on: The Convergence of Social Media and SEO
Q&A
Here’s a list of the questions we received from attendees during the webinar. The following answers were provided by Eric Enge and Erez Barak.
- How do we put Facebook Comments on our blogs? Is there a link to the “how to set one up,” or might the speakers forward the URL, please?
- Do you see the Like indicators in the search results if you are not logged in to Facebook or Twitter?
- As a user, if I click “+1″ does it affect my own visibility on the web? Does it show up on any profiles, show up when someone Googles my name? Just want to know how +1 affects the user.
- How do you define head vs. long tail? Is it based on position/level of the term or based on the terms rank and competitiveness using Google’s keyword tool or something else?
- What system is the best to track the business indicators? Google Analytics?
- What are some tips for increasing Facebook Likes?
- Why does Google say there is no relation between natural ranking and CPC?
- I have customers who are afraid to use social media because of control issues. As an example, educational or tutoring centers. How do they combat negative comments, etc.?
- Any key items to keep in mind while redesigning a new website?
- When dealing with people posting onto popular fan pages, is there an advantage to posting on popular fan pages, or does it use your authority regardless of where you post?
- How does Google know who your friends are? Do you have to be signed in to Facebook?
- Is there the ability to approve a Facebook comment first?
- If your friends have liked something on Facebook, does it rank higher in results?
- How do you identify link opportunities?
- How does LinkedIn fit in this social media mix?
- Does the Like of a brand page created on Facebook get connected by Google or Bing to the like of the brand’s URL? Or, do you need to have a Like button on the brand website?
- Is there any causation for the social signals and search ranking?
- What are some tips for getting sitelinks? Once the link structure is set up, what other elements play an important part of getting them?
- Do you know if/when the Google +1 button is going to be launched in Europe?
Erez: The Facebook Developers blog offers publishers the codes for each of their social plug-ins (e.g. Like button, Send button). You can find the Facebook Comments plug-in code there.
Eric: Here is the WordPress Facebook Comments plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/facebook-comments-for-wordpress.
Erez: In terms of Bing, you must have your Facebook account connected with Bing to see these Facebook annotations alongside search results. When you’re logged in, you will see which of your friends have liked a certain result. When you’re not logged in, Likes and retweets still take effect, but you’re not seeing that personal view because the search engines do not have that data about you at that point.
Eric: My testing indicates that you do need to be logged in.
Erez: You must have a Google Account to use Google +1 and be logged into your account to see +1s in your search results. Any search results, ads or web pages that you choose to +1 are publicly visible, however, these +1s also apear in a new tab on your Google profile, which is only visible to others if you choose to make it public. Effectively, if you make your Google profile public, as well as your +1s tab, someone could see this information if they were to Google your name.
Eric: Currently this is not clear, but it also something that you should expect to evolve over time. Google has not articulated a long-term social strategy, and the +1 is simply one piece of that strategy. Over time, I would expect that it could be used to show you in the search results in a fashion similar to what happens with Likes today.
Erez: For the sake of our research and the data that we presented, we viewed head terms as greater than 1,000 monthly searches & long tail as less than 100 monthly searches. Typically, the higher the number of monthly searches, the more the search term would be considered a head term. The lower the number of monthly searches, the more the term would be considered a long tail term.
Eric: I think of it this way:
a. The head terms are the 4 or 5 most popular terms related to a market space.
b. What I call the chunky middle is the next 10 to 15 most popular terms.
c. The long tail is everything else.
Erez: Tracking the business indicators should be the heart of your program. It’s a lot of what we do here at Optify. A lot of aligning SEO and social media has to do with getting those real time metrics, which is what Optify provides for you. I would recommend a combined approach when it comes to analytics, whether it’s Google Analytics or some other form of analytics–which are great, but usually not sufficient to align with your actual activities. Find a way at a high level that allows a system to take action, execute your campaigns and allows you to measure the metrics that matter to that campaign.
Eric: Google Analytics is sufficient for many web sites, and it is free. I often advise people to start with Google Analytics for basic web site metrics, and then consider other web analytics solutions only once they identify business indicators they want to track that Google Analytics does not support.
Erez: First you need to expose the Likes. But, you also need to make sure the Like button really aligns with your content. Even if you have great content, sometimes the headline could be a very negative headline (e.g. Tsunami Hits Japan). You don’t necessarily want to put a Like button on that content. People don’t necessarily want to Like bad news. Make sure that your content aligns to a Like or +1, that it’s easy to do and that what you do aligns with your SEO strategy. Having the two, social optimization and your SEO strategy, play together is really key for getting the synergy right between social and search.
Eric: Some tips include:
a. Make sure your rich content pages have Like buttons on them.
b. Be active in dialogues on Facebook. In particular, build your network and attempt to develop relationships with influencers in your space.
c. Create a fan page and use that to build visibility.
d. Leverage the news feed aspects of Facebook. Creating content that gets show on the walls of your current fans is great, but if you can get them to Share it, the content will also show up on the wall of their friends too. The Share button is a great tool, as is the Send button.
Erez: The correlation we showed in our data was between the CTR (how many people actually clicked a result) and the number of monthly searches and the CPC value. This research does not show a connection between how you rank and how you rank in paid vs organic. It’s all about what people could click on, and once you rank, where do you get most links.
Eric: As Erez noted in the call, his slides spoke to a correlation, which is different than causation. Ultimately, there are many strategic reasons why Google needs to maintain strict separation between the organic results and paid results. The most important of these is that the organic results are portrayed as being objectively determined, and if that were not the case it would cause major legal issues for Google.
Erez: The first step is to listen. See what people are saying about you and about your industry. It’s not about commenting and fixing the problem right away. I recommend a first step of listening, learning and following because only then, do you have a strategy that’s less error-prone. Take these steps for your business instead of just diving head first into Twitter or Facebook.
Eric: The main thing that people need to realize is that the conversation about their business will take place whether or not you participate. So if someone has something negative to say, but you do not engage in social media, they will say that in some social environment and you will not have an opportunity to respond. By participating, you give yourself the opportunity to respond to the negative feedback.
Erez: Keep your end goals in mind and think about where you want to end up six months down the road. Ask yourself which keywords you want to rank for, audit your links, find a way to measure your business indicators and monitor customer sentiment. Make sure not to skip over these steps.
Eric: There are many aspects to this question. Read this article to get some insight into the potential SEO risks in major web site changes: http://searchengineland.com/calculating-the-true-seo-costs-of-major-site-changes-28879. In addition, make sure you treat the user experience as a major factor in your redesign. As of the Panda update, this is something that Google is trying to measure and count as a ranking factor.
Eric: Not sure I understand the question, but as a user posting on a fan page, popular or not, will not affect your authority on Facebook. However, an authoritative user can benefit the fan page by posting there.
Erez: Google recently added the option for users to connect their various social networking accounts privately in their Google Account, with the option to display those connections publicly across their Google Profile as well. These social networks include: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora, Yahoo, Flickr, Yelp, etc.
Eric: Google can match up information in your Google profile with information on your public Facebook page.
Erez: Yes, the Facebook Comments plugin gives designated moderators the option to approve all comments before they’re posted. Moderators can find this under the plugin’s Settings option next to “Moderation Mode” by clicking, “Let me approve each comment before it is shown to everyone.”
Eric: Since the comments appear inside the Facebook Comments page, they are not actually visible to the crawler as being on your site (if you view page source you can’t see them in the source code). So spammers may insert a spam link, but it is no different than placing a spam link in my own news feed, but also that of my friends. There is zero incentive for a spammer to do that.
Eric: Bing has confirmed that it will rank higher in their results. Google has not clarified whether or not it does in their SERPs as yet. My guess is that it does not in Google yet, but will in the future.
Erez: Use a link suggestion tool to uncover and track relevant, authoritative sites that you can contact and request a link back to your content. Inbound links are crucial for ranking, but make sure the links you’re going after are relevant and will be seen as such by the engines.
Eric: Oh my, this is a big question! There are many approaches to this problem. The two easiest ways I know are:
a. See who links to your competitors. Focus not only on the specific links they receive, but also on the types of entities that link to them. For example, if one chamber of commerce links to them you can approach that same chamber of commerce, but also other chambers of commerce that do not link to the competitor.
b. See who links to the sites that come up in the search results for which you would like to rank.
Erez: LinkedIn is certainly part of the equation, too. With LinkedIn’s recently released developer platform and social plugins, they’re offering publishers more options than ever before for setting up their website for social sharing and engagement. Make sure to included LinkedIn’s Share button among the social sharing options for your content and research their other available social plugins and determine which ones make the most sense for your business and website. As I mentioned in Question #12, Google now provides Google Account users an option for connecting their LinkedIn accounts with their account–so, we know LinkedIn matters to the search engines.
Eric: One great way to use LinkedIn is to use their InMail service. With one of their paying accounts you can use it to contact major influencers even if they are not currently connected to you. The unsoliticed Inmail volume you can send is quite limited, but this is a great way to reach these types of people, as the open rate of unsolictedInMail’s is much higher than it is for unsolicited emails.
Erez: Receiving Likes on your Facebook brand page is important for demonstrating influence and authority to the search engines, but those ‘votes’ are just part of the equation. Businesses should make sure they include social sharing buttons, such as the Like button, on relevant, ‘likeable’ content across their website in order to grab the attention of the search engines crawling these pages for social signals.
Eric: This is a link that the search engines can make, but how they are using that signal currently is not clear.
Erez: Yes, both Google and Bing have confirmed that when they deem social results to be the most relevant result for searchers, they’re boosting the rank for search results that contain these social signals (e.g. Several of your friends have Liked or retweeted a link).
Eric: Yes. You can see what Danny Sullivan found out from the search engines here: http://searchengineland.com/what-social-signals-do-google-bing-really-count-55389. You can also see how that has expanded in the interview I did more recently with Stefan Weitz of Bing: http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-stefan-weitz.shtml
Eric: I know of no way to get Google to provide sitelinks. This is determined algorithmically by Google, and most likely is based on Google seeing the site as being the authoritative enough for the given query (such as a query on the brand name of your company), and, enough query volume for the term as well.
Erez: According to Google’s Social Web Blog, “+1 annotations currently only appear for English search results on Google.com. We’re [Google] working on releasing +1 to searchers worldwide in the future.”
About Stone Temple Consulting
Stone Temple Consulting (STC) has been providing SEO Consulting services for over 5 years. STC has worked with a wide range of clients, ranging from small silicon valley start-ups, to Fortune 25 companies. STC has two partners, Eric Enge and John Biundo, and a team of senior SEO consultants, who provide SEO and SEM services for the company’s clients.
