Do you want to know how to make the most of social SEO? Adam Stafford, managing director at search agency Fresh Egg, reveals all
Links are the lifeblood of the web. Seventy per cent of Google’s algorithm is link-based and the more on-topic your links are, the better. So you need a very targeted approach if you want to top the rankings – ignore the recent revolution in social media at your peril.
“Before, you're trying to get a small group of website owners to link to you, but you’ve now got this wide range of user-generated content, blogs and profiles. Build relationships with them, give them good content to link to and you’ve got an entire network of people within a niche to connect with.”
Shift in attitudes
Doing this successfully means a big shift in attitudes. Social SEO is like going back to the old days of haggling in the marketplace; you’re standing there and the person you’re dealing with is right in front of you. There’s a big crowd around you and you can always be heard, so the trader has to respond and be legitimate and authentic – they can’t pull the wool over people’s eyes.
It’s important to know who you’re targeting and how they think. “Take Digg, for example,” says Claire Stokoe, our social media engineer. “If you don’t know anything about it and you don’t know how its users work, there’s no way you’re going to get your articles onto the first page because it’s a totally different audience from the blogging audience and the audience in forums. It’s so important to understand your audience and to work in a targeted way.”
The crossover between SEO and social media comes about because the more connections you have with authoritative people, the more links you can get from them and the more attested your site becomes. Google ranks authoritative sites higher, so if you can connect with those influencers, their links are like gold. The more you know about your industry and the more passionate you are, the easier it is to identify these key influencers.
However, with social media you have to be very careful not to jeopardise relationships. If you’re talking to someone and it’s clear you’re trying to get a link out of them rather than build a genuine relationship, people can get suspicious.
From an SEO point of view, it’s also important to be aware that because a lot of links in social media are user-generated, such as Twitter profile links and links from social bookmarks, they have a nofollow tag. These were brought in by search engines to say “this link shouldn’t pass anyway”, so they’re actually useless for using with SEO.
The long game
While a lot of SEO work is quick-win and instantly measurable, with social SEO it’s a much slower process. You don’t just walk into a pub in the middle of nowhere and expect to know everyone in the room; you have to go in there and get to know them and maybe go back another couple of nights. You’re not going to do that straight away.
There're so many supposed social media experts out there who don’t really have a handle on the technical side, but it’s so important. You simply can’t work effectively if you don’t actually understand SEO and why you want to get to the top of the rankings.
It’s just about utilising all this different content; an SEO division could take control of a blog and then a social media division could talk about aggregating that content and making sure that everything is linked up and measurable, but there has to be an understanding there in the first place.
Sony’s balls
An example of good social SEO was the Sony Bravia advert with the bouncing balls in San Francisco. It was a massive project that drew a lot of attention, so when the company was filming it, bystanders were filming it as well. But instead of Sony clamping down and doing what the Scrabble guys did on Facebook, it embraced it.
Sony found out who its one per cent were – the bloggers who were writing about them – gave them a mini Bravia TV each and brought them on set to watch the filming.
