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Why You Can’t Ignore Social Media For Keyword Research

Posted in Blog on February 8, 2012 by Josh Sturgeon

All of search marketing begins with finding the most popular keywords, right?

Wrong.

Conducting research to find popular keywords is an important step in the process of driving more qualified traffic to your website, but it is not the ultimate consideration for search marketing. Finding the most popular keywords points to something more important–user behavior and intent.

Behind every query there is a person. A real, living, breathing human being who has thoughts, fears, hopes and dreams. Every keyword used in these queries represents a user’s intentions. Running a keyword research report can accurately measure the actions taken by users, but it can’t always identify the reasons why they chose to use those keywords.

Why It Pays To Understand Search Intent

More Relevant Visitors: You wouldn’t invite a vegetarian over your house to eat a meat lover’s pizza. But when you haphazardly choose keywords based search volume alone, you run the risk of inviting the wrong people to your website. Understanding why your customers search for certain keywords is just as important as understanding what they search for. Figure this out early in the keyword research process and you will attract the right visitors.

Better Content Creation: Understanding the intent of users makes for more robust content creation. When you understand the motivation behind a search, your blog posts are no longer written for search engines, they are written for people. You write in order to solve their problems, make them think, make them laugh, etc.

More Effective Linkbuilding: Understanding why people are searching in the first place helps you create content that they naturally want to share with others.

Higher Conversion Rates: Writing good copy is always about selling benefits instead of features. Knowing your users’ search intent allows you to craft higher converting landing pages.

Anticipation of The Long Tail: Over 70% of the queries that will bring in traffic to your website are not going to show up with any significant search volume in a keyword research report. (See a great illustration here at SEOMoz) This phenomenon is commonly known as the “long tail”. Webmasters and search experts will find long tail keywords in their analytics reports after people visit their site. But using social media allows you to anticipate what types of long tail combinations might be valuable for your business.

How To Uncover Search Intent with Social Media (aka Mind Reading 101)

1) Identify online communities that are relevant to your niche

Virtually every niche is represented by an online community. By a community, I’m simply referring to a network of people who are communicating online, usually around specific pieces content. Blogs, forums, and platforms like Facebook and Twitter are a few examples of places where communities interact.

It’s important for you to identify where the conversations are happening that pertain to your niche. But searching within each major social network individually would take a very long time and it’s likely that you’ll get distracted from your initial goal! Use one or more of the following tools to search across every major social network simultaneously for topics related to your niche:

Socialmention.com
Spy.appspot.com
whostalkin.com
samepoint.com

Once you have identified where the conversations are taking place, be sure to remember where they are. Take full advantage of tools like an RSS feed to stay engaged with blogs and relevant news feeds.

Think of these online communities as focus groups. You get a (free) chance to listen in on what matters most to your audience.

2) Identify the influencers within those communities

Every community has “go to” guys or gals that are upheld as an authority on certain topics. Frankly, this should be you, but we will address that in another post. Right now, you are concerned with uncovering the search intent of your potential customers. To do it effectively, you need to know who they are following online and why. We all are playing a long game of “follow the leader”. If you want to learn more about an audience, see what their leader is writing/recommending/ranting about.

Influencers will not only have large followings, they will have a lot of users engaging with their content.

Here are some of the characteristics of an influencer:

They are quoted and linked to regularly across the blogosphere
They are frequently re-tweeted on Twitter, or their status updates are “liked” hundreds or thousands of times on Facebook
They command thousands of subscribers on their RSS feed
They are found guest blogging on other major industry sites

Hootsuite.com has a helpful tool that will actually quantify a certain person’s influence across different social media platforms–they call it a Klout score. Of course, you don’t want to get too bogged down in the details. Use common sense, and don’t ignore some of the obvious signs of an influencer.

Most importantly for your efforts right now–why are these people popular in the community? What is it that draws people to their blog? Expertise is an obvious answer. But ask some of these questions to drill deeper:

What types of problems are they solving for the community?
What types of opinion pieces get people fired up?

3) Identify the most popular content within your community

Finding the most popular content is not just about taking a look at the first page Google rankings. Web 2.0 is a very dynamic environment where people are sharing content across different media. Google does a great job of ranking popular pages (it is there job afterall) but that doesn’t mean they will get it right everytime. It’s up to you to find popular posts, articles, videos and more.

Here are a few questions to guide your investigation:

How much is that content shared across social networks?
Does it inspire other blog posts/articles that offer rebuttals?
Does it have any commercial value?

Some tools for your search:

Google+ Popular Posts (socialstatistics.com). Find out what is most popular across Google+ using a variety of search paramenters. Also view demographic information on those sharing the content..
Alltop.com Find the hottest topics from virtually any category
Reddit.com, Digg.com or Stumbleupon.com. These are each “social bookmarking” sites where people share and categorize their favorite content online.
Itstrending.com measures the amount of times a piece of content is shared across Facebook.

4) Study the conversation

Now that you have found a relevant online community, identified influencers and their most popular content, you are ready for the real heavy lifting. The absolute best way to uncover search intent is to be a student of the conversations in your niche. A conversation can be anything from a string of blog comments to an exchange on Twitter.

Some questions to ask as you study:

What are the buzz words used by potential clients?
Are there common abbreviations or other nuances to the language used when describing a product or service?

Flikr: "Clairity"

Take a close look at the comment strings in a blog post. What are the types of responses that trigger the most interaction? What boils people’s blood? What inspires them? What moves them to tears of joy (or frustration). Become a student of these responses and you will begin to understand what drives your audience to participate online.

One quick way to detect a hot conversation is to dig through the re-tweets of an influencer in your community. Check out retweetrank.com to quickly find the tweets that have sparked the most interest.

5) Study the users in each community

Remember, every search online has a real person behind it. So far, you have learned about tools that will help you identify where people are interacting online and what drives them to participate. All of this research will help you uncover what makes your audience tick. Once you find potential customers who are active in a niche-relevant community, track them.

Follow a sample of users (you decide the size) for a period of 30 days.
Identify trends about what they share, or respond to online.
Make private Twitter lists that help you quickly read over a user’s activity.
Group people into Google+ Circles.

Discover how your audience chooses to identify themselves. What are the words they use to describe themselves in a profile bio (e.g. “tech-geek”, “social media nerd”, “entrepreneurial mom blogger”).

Be A Mind Reader, But Use Real Data

The beauty of search marketing is that you rarely have to guess. There are plenty of ways to gather meaningful analytics. Don’t risk assuming that a high volume search term has commercial value to your business. If you do the hard work up front of learning why and how your potential customers interact online, you will be rewarded with a more focused keyword strategy.

TAGS: content creation, keyword research, social media

WordPress SEO benefits in less than 2 minutes

Posted in Blog on January 30, 2012 by Robert Cavilla

A client asked today for a quick list of SEO benefits they should consider when evaluating wordpress as a potential new CMS. Where they just wanted a quick informal list, and the SEO world is moving faster than ever especially on a Monday, I came up with this list in less than 2 minutes just off the top of my head without checking any other notes or documentation. I kind of surprised myself as to how many I came up with, so figured I would share, and please share back any other benefits you can think of:

Open source ensures platform can be customized and is always being improved and compatible with changes in SEO best practices
Can configure to have SEO friendly URLs
Can be configured to allow custom and rules based tagging
Facilitates content creation
Facilitates blog creation and updates
Can give different people different access levels- administrator, editor, author, etc.
Can set rules so new content is ‘pending’ until approved by an administrator, but author can enter info right in to the cms saving a step
Can set days/times for content to be published which is good for managing freshness
Can easily integrate social media sharing buttons
Can easily integrate 3rd party widgets which can help user experience among other benefits
Tools are available to help migrate sites in and out of wordpress and other CMS systems so you don’t need to change your design/branding
Free SEO Plugins exist to help provide additional SEO options and customizations
Can implement Google Analytics, webmaster verifications, and other custom tracking and tags
Provides wyswyg and html editing options
Can save images and videos in a media library so they are one click away from adding to new content/posts
Design can be custom designed, do not need to use free or paid themes, although they can sometimes help provide a foundation for customization
Many designers/developers are skilled at working with wordpress

TAGS: content management, seo, seo technology

Google Local Search and Getting Places Page Reviews

Posted in Blog on January 23, 2012 by Paul Schmidt

Often times our clients will ask: How do we optimize our local Google Places profiles to help appear in local search listings?

We are able to give them loads of advice to make sure their local profile page is optimized, completely filled out, AND the information is consistent with all of their other digital touchpoints (ie. Internet directories, social profiles, website contact us page, etc…)

Then comes one of the toughest parts of improving a local profile…getting reviews.

Google is continually adapting its search algorithm to make social influence a bigger factor in rankings. Google’s Search, plus Your World is another evident sign of this.

Though gaining positive reviews through sites like Yelp, Trip Advisor, and Urbanspoon are also important for building your company’s reputation, you need to think about sending some of your positive reviewers to your Google Places Page to gain better local search rankings.

Here are 5 steps to get more reviews for your Google Places Page:

Shorten and track your local profile URL: Run your Google Places URL through a URL shortener like bit.ly, goo.gl, or ow.ly.

Now you have a shortened URL that is easy to track. You can even run this same URL several times through the shortener if you want to track this URL across different outlets (twitter, facebook, blog post, press release, etc) and see which outlet is gaining the most traction.

Reviews through Social Media: Place your shortened Google Places URL on your company’s Facebook profile, Google+ page, Twitter Profile and blog, and encourage positive customers to review your service.
Reviews after Service Completion: Place your shortened Google Places URL on the invoice or Thank You letter after completion of service, and ask satisfied customers for a review.
Reviews from Customer History: If you have access to your previous customer’s history, contact the customers and see if they would be willing to give you a review.
Reviews from other review sites: Look at other review sites like Yelp. Often times if you login, you’ll be able to see information from reviewers of your business. Privately reach out to people that have already given you a positive review, and ask if they would be willing to write one up on your Google Places page.

Some industries are harder and more competitive than others to move up in rankings, however, by increasing your amount of positive reviews to your Google Places page, you will have a much higher chance of gaining a substantial amount of local search traffic.

What are some easy ways you’ve used to increase local traffic to your Google Places Profile?

TAGS: Google Places, local seo, social media

Social & SEO: 4 Essential Social Media KPI’s

Posted in Blog on January 10, 2012 by Greg Smith

It’s 2012. SEO & Social Media go together like peanut butter & jelly. If you’re a newcomer to the social space, you’ve probably realized it’s very difficult to do one without the other nowadays. The amount of content being seen and shared on social media is growing by leaps and bounds and as we look forward into the new year, social media is sure to become an even larger part of the SEO web. It’s fairly well known at this point that Google & Bing each factor social actions like “retweets” and Facebook “Likes” & “Shares” of your websites content into their ranking algorithms. These actions can help improve the organic rank of those pages. But, as more and more content is found and shared using social media, it’s likely that search engines will continue to place more emphasis on social activity.

So at this point you’ve got yourself set up on Facebook, Twitter, Google +, etc and you’re following the rules of trying to grow your audience and post useful, engaging content. Now… how do you show your boss or your clients that your social media efforts are working? Here is a list of social media KPI’s that we suggest you focus on as you begin your voyage into the social media world. (Keep in mind there are many paid social monitoring tools that make tracking these metrics easier for you, which is a blog post for a different date… but at the very least, these are the metrics you should be concerned with).

1. Network/Audience Size & Growth Over Time

While having the largest social profile does not necessarily have a direct impact on performance, you still need an audience to see your content and start sharing it, which does have an impact. Focus on growing your audience with relevant followers who have an interest in the type of content you post.

2. Engagement with Content & Growth Over Time

You’ve probably heard this term thrown around a lot. And “engagement” on a social site will mean something different for every social platform. At a high level, engagement should monitor the number of social interactions your content receives. Here are some examples:

Facebook – monitor the # of Comments, Likes, Shares of a wall post
Twitter – monitor the # of Retweets, Mentions, Replies of a tweet
Google+ – monitor the # of Comments, +1’s of a wall post

3. Traffic to Website & Growth Over Time

Now that we have wall posts that have been shared, liked, retweeted etc, how do we measure that for value to the client? A good start is with traffic back to your website. This is one way to show whether your time spent on social media has been valuable. Track visits at the very least. If you have more time try taking it one step further and take a look at page views, time on site, bounce rate and conversions from social platforms.

At a high level, here is an example of these 3 KPI’s (using Facebook as an example) in an easy to digest dashboard view that could easily be sent to a client:

4. Content with Most Interaction

Also worth monitoring is the content that receives the most Likes/Shares/Comments on Facebook, the most Retweets on Twitter, the most +1’s on Google, etc. This not only shows you which posts & content turn out to be the most viral, but also allows you to trend what types of content are most often shared. Now you can focus your social efforts on creating related content. This also serves as a great way to test what types of content to create for your website too. Repurpose your successful social content into content for SEO purposes, content for your website. Successful content on social media can almost always be repurposed in different formats across social platforms, including your website.

Even if you’re new to the social media world but can manage to start taking a look at the metrics above, you’re on the way to using social media to enhance your SEO efforts. There’s no denying that social may become even more important in 2012, so you might as well put a monitoring process in place.

TAGS: seo, social media

Google Penalizes Itself for Unethical SEO

Posted in Blog on January 4, 2012 by Robert Cavilla

Hard to believe, but Google inadvertently broke its own quality guidelines. One of Google’s media agencies paid bloggers to promote the Google Chrome browser. Regardless of if they did this for SEO or not- this goes directly against everything we as SEO professionals have been told NOT to do by Google! This also shows how truly hard it is to run a completely ethical SEO program these days. Even an agency as reputable to gain Google as a client is using gray hat / unethical online marketing practices.

So what was the result of this action?

The agency issued an apology and stated it conducted the practice without Google’s approval.
Google actually penalized itself for unethical SEO practices. Kudos to Google, they do not appear on the first page of results for “web browser”. As Matt Cutts explains:

“In response, the webspam team has taken manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome for at least 60 days. After that, someone on the Chrome side can submit a reconsideration request documenting their clean-up just like any other company would. During the 60 days, the PageRank of www.google.com/chrome will also be lowered to reflect the fact that we also won’t trust outgoing links from that page.” http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-penalizes-chrome/38469/

It is good to see that Google has penalized itself as it would other web sites. Even if for any other reason their action helps keep SEO spam relevant and a consideration for those agencies that participate in unethical tactics, helping to hopefully level the playing field for the rest of us that abide by Google’s quality guidelines.

This also shows how important it is for SEO agencies, and marketing companies in general, to truly understand their client’s business. In this case the agency proved that:

they did not understand SEO, and even if they were not paying bloggers for SEO benefit, they showed their overall lack of understanding of the intertwining cause and effect relationships of all online marketing efforts
they did not understand their own client’s business.

Here’s hoping that larger agencies don’t harm the reputation of SEO for ethical agencies, and that all SEO spam, not just that of large companies, results in ranking penalization in 2012.

TAGS: google, seo, seo ethics

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