Search and Social Content Strategy – #Pubcon Liveblog was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
How much time should you spend creating and promoting your online content? What’s the relationship between search and social? Get practical and effective content tips from the experts in this Pubcon Las Vegas session called Search and Social Content Strategy. Jordan Kasteler, our very own Mindy Weinstein, and Bill Hartzer all share their unique tactics on how to improve content that wins for both SEO and social campaigns.
Jordan Kasteler: Push Your Content to the Next Level
He’ll be covering these topics:
- Creating vs. promoting content
- Sharing success
- Promotion don’ts and dos
- Content measurement
CoSchedule says you should spend at least ¼ of the amount of time you spend creating the content to promote it. Jordan says that’s the minimum and you should spend equal amount of time creating as promoting.
He gives us a few examples to show that there is no correlation between shares and traffic. People share content without consuming it.
Promotion Don’ts: propel promotion of your content by:
Don’t spam. Use these tactics sparingly.
Don’t share if you don’t feel good about your content. If it isn’t good enough, make it better or don’t share it.
Link sharing sites (delicious, stumbleupon, reddit) let you submit content into democratic vote systems and it can propel content up to tens or hundreds of thousands of page views.
Niche link sharing sites: inbound.org, growthhackers, biz shugar, and Lawster.
Visual sharing sites: If you’re sharing visual content, Pinterest and Instagram (can be harder to drive traffic to your site due to the nature of it being a mobile app with no links in post captions).
Post to social groups: LinkedIn Groups, Google+ Communities, Facebook Groups – the real value of LinkedIn, Google+ and even Facebook is in the power of groups. It’s a niche community who are engaged, have their own blogs and may share and propel your content.
Indicate authorship: For example:
Niche forums – there are still niche forums that can drive traffic to your audience.
If it’s a credible forum, there are community rules.
Syndication sites: BuzzFeed, tumblr, Medium, LinkedIn Pulse. Copy and paste the content and at the end link to the “source.” If you do a private syndication site (like a very niche blog), make sure to indicate the canonical source of the content with rel=canonical.
Paid syndication sites: Outbrain, Taboola – these are the sources you see as “related content” or links in Huffington Post, for example. It’s especially good for clickbait like content.
Make it Easy to Share and Link: include social media share icons or embed code. Narrow down the options that you want people to use to share.
Link to Past Content
Get Employees to Share – encourage your employees to like, share and comment on posts on selected social media platforms. Turn your employees into brand ambassadors.
Email others: weekly or monthly emails of your top posts and reach out to influencers.
Sharing timing – test this out on your own. Time your scheduled Facebook posts, 5 to 10 minutes before the hour. People waiting on phone calls may be more inclined to click on your content.
As far as resharing, Twitter is where you have the most leeway for sharing multiple times. People often share once and don’t reshare.
As a rule of thumb, reshare until people stop engaging with the content.
Support sharers of your content. See how they shared your content. If you see people continuing to support you, support their content too. It’s a reciprocal feedback loop.
Support comments and reply to every comment.
Cross-promote between paid, owned and earned.
Use your email signature to show people where you write content.
Measuring the ROI
You have so many metrics. You see time spent, bounces, exits, on-page metrics, social metrics. How do you know which to look at to decide if content is successful? Look at the Moz “the one metric” post and you can pull in all these metrics and combine them with a weighted score. This provides an idea of how content is performing at a glance.
Mindy Weinstein: Search Social Content Strategy
How do you create the content – knowing the people who are going to read it and share it.
Three main takeaways:
- Know your audience inside and out.
- Understand the relationship between search and social.
- Publish the right content for the right people.
Know your audience inside and out. Think about the evolution of the user, as search engines are following it. Focus on who you’re trying to connect with. Keyword research is one secret to understanding what words your audience is using. A tool for the job: SEOTools.com/ksp-tool.
Personas: identify characteristics of your target audience, including their goals and beliefs. What to read: “Web Personas: Creating Jane.”
Surveys can take out the mystery. Use SurveyMonkey.com to ask customers what matters to them and what questions they have.
Talk to your customers or people in your company who are on the front lines.
Look at the Share a Coke campaign. People’s names on Coke cans are highly shareable because everyone’s name is their favorite word.
Understand the relationship between social and search because your SEO job is to be the expert. Social expands your reach and visibility (so does search), but your focus should be on relationships and engagement. Lush Cosmetics is her example of a brand who does this right.
Hashtags – more low hanging fruit that you don’t want to forget to categorize your content and get it in front of people. Just because you take spaces out doesn’t make it a hashtag.
Publish the right content for the right people. Check out SocialMention for idea generation. She gives an example of the Domestic Violence Center. Their website and social media posts were focused on victims of domestic violence but those channels were really supposed to gain more donor support. Their first event since Mindy started working on their web content they got 3x the donations.
What’s the right frequency? There’s no one answer. Look at what are your competitors doing. What do your customers expect? Tool to try: perchapp.com.
Create headlines that attract search engines and readers – then create headlines for your social networks! Tool: the emotional marketing value headline analyzer. The tool scores and EMV (emotional marketing value) of a given headline.
Bill Hartzer: Search and Social Content Strategy
Bill’s been doing organic/natural SEO since 1996. He’ll give a history of social signals and how they impact rankings.
History of social signals and SEO:
Real-time search launched December 2009. Google started to show a Twitter firehose of tweets in search results. In July 2011, the Twitter firehose ended and then just this year it’s been reinstated.
Google’s goal in 2009 is the same as today – the freshest and most relevant content in search results.
Google has been vocal on social signals as a ranking factor:
Bill says that he expects in 2019, Google could be using social signals 100% of the time and maybe today it’s more like 50%.
What can you do now? Set up social profiles, post something on each social account, personal account, company accounts, actively every day. Promote Facebook posts, even just $5, because Facebook basically doesn’t show brand content without paid promotion.
Google+ – don’t remove authorship from your sites. It may come back at any point if google decides to use it again.
Optimize your profile on Google+ – fill out the entire fields and make it unique content. Share and create a visually rich experience.
He normally doesn’t post at 5 o’clock on a Friday before leaving the office for the weekend because the promotion piece needs time to pull together. Write several versions of the title/headline/summaries because you don’t want duplicate content.
Promoting posts on social media sites – network with others to help promote. Bloggers write the alternate post, summary post and links to you. Promote both summary posts and main post.
We know that +1s, tweets, and likes don’t count as social ranking signals. But we should keep sharing because traffic goes up with social visibility.
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