Social SEO

[Ashley Thompson]

We have all heard of SEO and know it's important for our business.  I would like to introduce everyone to a new take on SEO and what it can do for your business, Social SEO!

Social SEO encompasses the idea that social media links and interaction play a part in search rankings.  Since the interaction of businesses and consumers is hard to fake, social media holds an increasing amount of weight for search engines.

Try it out!  Go over to Bing and do a search for your business.  Seriously, give it a try.  Look to the right hand side of the screen, you will see the social search results for your business.  It shows who is talking about your business on social media and other social search results.  This can be a huge opportunity for your business! By the way, 30% of searches are now done on Bing.

According to Nielsen Research, 92% of consumers trust recommendations from friends and family more than any kind of advertising.  So when people see these social media connections, it is much more effective than an advertisement.  These opportunities will continue to grow, especially with Facebook's new graph search.  But that is a whole blog post in itself!

So how do you increase your Social SEO?

1. First, update your company profiles with the keywords you chose to optimize your website with.  You want your social strategy to align with your SEO strategy.

2. Include social sharing buttons on your content.  Go beyond the basic like button and encourage your content to be shared.  Try pay-by-tweet downloads or easy share links throughout your posts.

3. Start thinking of your fans as extensions of your inbound marketing team.  Identify a list of your followers that engage in your content regularly.  Then chose the ones with a large number of followers themselves.  These are your social media influencers.  You want to nurture and encourage them!  Thank them, send them special deals, include them in sneak peaks of upcoming news and announcements!

4.  Don't leave out Google +, if Google builds it you should come.  Google is the top search engine to rank with, and being active on their platform is an investment worth making.  They are consistently rewarding businesses that are active on their platform with higher search engine rankings.

5. Tweet to get indexed faster.  To get time sensitive blog posts indexed faster post them to Twitter.

6. Post consistently.  The more often you post to social media platforms with relevant content, the more you prove to Google that you are an expert in your field.  This will also increase your rankings.  

7.  Create great, useful content.  If you only take away one thing from this blog, this is it.  If you create great content you are already half way there, the rest will fall into place.  There is no better way to get your content shared than by just creating something that everyone will want to read.

I hope this helped introduce everyone to Social SEO!  If you liked this blog or have questions, feel free to comment below!

[Anna Edwards]

I really need to carve out some time and do this. Thanks so much Ashley!

[Ashley Thompson]

Thanks Billie!  I am glad you learned so much! It was great to see you today :)

[Billie Crooks]

Thanks Ashley for a great presentation today.  I learned alot and goggle plus I will at least fix up my profile over there.  Didn't know that good stuff about BING so will be visiting there as well.