SMX West 2012: Integrating SEO and Social Media

In this session, we have a three-person panel showcasing examples and successes of combining social and search. Shall we get to it? First up:

Tim Grenda, Matrix direct

How do you sell life insurance in social media?

Social media is fun and friendly, but who wants to be friends with an insurance agent?

Case Study 1: They opened up a feature on their wall called, “Ask an expert.”

It got people talking and resulted in:

1. 5K page views
2. 3,800 unique page views
3. Bounce rate: 60%
4. Average time spent on page 1/14

Most writing in asking for a term life quote. About 10% ask them to stop emailing them.

Case study 2: Infographics

Title of infographic: Is your job killing you? 

• 3K page view
• avg time on page 2.5 minutes
• promoted through press release, reddit, Pinterest, and email to database (2.2 million)

Other strategy: Content distribution

• Blogging
• Post in Twitter, Facebook, etc.

He doesn’t like robotic social media, stays personally involved with their personal voice and personality, and keeps it as manual as possible. Doesn’t use tools like Hootsuite.

Up next:

Jennete Banks from IBM CityOne Game

10 years search at IBM. In the beginning it was just content.

2010 launched CityOne game. Idea to use technology to solve real world problems. They branded a word no one knew or heard of – “CityOne.” She was told to optimize for it but was worried no one would search for it. Then they found the word was taking on it’s own life in social media. Before long the keyword was there top 4 keywords in Analytics. So social + SEO did the trick.

Other games sites were creating traffic for them. They weren’t linking to them, but because the on-site optimization was done, their page was found in search.

Conclusion:

• Social media drives organic search results and that led to 200%+ increase in conversions.
• “Social media drives the conversation; Organic search should capture the conversation.”
• Create opportunities by coordinating social media and organic search

1. Build a strong organic search foundation for your content via education for all marketers
2. Coordinate social, PR and search strategy within your company!
3. Tell one coherent story with messaging and URLS
4. Create sticky content with crossover opps
5. Monitor your metrics for magical opportunities and unexpected wins – where is the sweet spot where there are no links and where there are a lot

Last but not least:

Jeff MacGurn – Covario

A tactical approach to Google Plus Your World

Optimize Google+ profiles of those in your company because they will show up in search.

Personalized results

1. Develop Google Plus accounts
2. Build circles as much as possible with things like Special Offers
3. Develop content to push out to Circles
4. Optimize content for maximum exposure in search results such as recent news

• Social Media monitoring
• Google Trends
• News

Keywords you mention and what you say is important to how it will show in SERPS.

Brand personality profiles

• All brand evangelists should have Google Plus profiles
• Optimize those profiles and develop strategy around updates
• Promote those profiles in Google Plus
• Build up their followers

Pinterest

• 70% female
• Pinterest users spend almsot as much time o site as Youtube users ~15 minutes
• Over a million visitors daily
• High income demographic, ages 16-34 mainly
• People share links here, they want to see content from other sites

How to get most out of Pinterest account

• Your icon matters – he used his adorable niece, be cute, creative.
• Theme your boards appropriately – design, humor, animals, and food do well. For example, if you make laptops, post a cake that looks like a laptop.
• Name your boards appropriately. Familiar brand names work well.
• Post regularly and not too much of your own stuff.
• Images do the best (obviously). In interviews he’s done, users say they want images.
• Cute or delicious sells. Design also.
• Find content from other sites and repost from Twitter, FB, Reddit, Stumbleupon. Easy way to build up content.
• Create and monitor RSS Feeds from content sources to get content, pictures, etc.

SEO benefit of Pinterest

• Links are nofollowed  — he sees correlation between no-follow links and ranking.
• Pinterest is a good source of traffic for activce users:
• One test site they worked on saw almost 25% of its traffic come from Pinterest.
• Content highly shared on Pinterest gets shared elsewhere.
• Google is actively indexing Pinterest content so your chances for additional SERP saturation are higher.

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Q/A Answers

• Social sentiment is being measured by Google. Seems likely it affects rank. Hard to prove.  Try to influence that with what you do in social. Seventy percent of social sentiment expressed online in social is positive.
• Overly optimized anchor tags is bad signal. Covario has more success with less than optimal anchor text.

Kathy Long is one of the original "Digital Divas," having jumped on the Internet bandwagon back in its infancy in 1995 when she started her own company, Kat & Mouse. Her current passions are SEO, Local Search and what she calls "SECRO" (Search Engine Conversion Rate Optimization), as well as public speaking and teaching groups of SMB business owners on how to get their websites to ka-ching.

See Kathy's author page for links to connect on social media.