The Marriage of SEO & Social Media

Editor's Notes

1. >>Put tweet us thingAt my first office way back when 5 years ago we used to call Mondays McDonalds Mondays because we would eat Egg Mcmuffins for bfast and sometimes Big Macs for lunch. After we realized that was crushing our company’s productivity we changed it to Marketing Mondays. We would focus on things like SEO and social media and it seems to have had a great impact on our growth. Well, the companies that is. I have lost 20 pounds and don’t feel like death every Monday morning after breakfast.In every presentation I give I promise two things – 1. We will have fun and - 2. You will have specific, actionable items you can take back and implement today to grow your company. I am not the type of presenter who likes to tease you with bits in hopes that you will hire me for the whole project. I will tell you EVERYTHING you need to know to make your marketing campaigns successful.Let’s get this shit started!
2. >> Insert Agency 100 pic, client logos mentioned“So let’s get a bit of foreplay going before we dive deep into the presentation. A little about Cardinal – we have been around for about 5 years, predominatnly an SEO and paid serach company. Google us – SEO Company – we are #1. Also been featured in all the big plublications and work with clients like Hilton, , J&J, Sotheby’s etc. Recently awarded the fastsest growing agency in the Southeast US, 8 th in the nation.”
3. “Lets talk about what I consider to be social media just so we are all on the same page
4. “Social is being present anywhere a conversation is happening about your company, whether or not you are involved. And remember, when we discuss social media, I wont be just referring to facebook, twitter, and google+, I also consider yelp, kudzu, and other review sites to be part of social media. Anywhere people are talking about you is somewhere you need to be paying attention. Believe it or not, but Google is watching everything you do on these channels and it all plays into your search engine rankings.
5. “We just discussed what I consider to be social media, now lets dive into SEO”
6. “SEO is simple, its showing up in the organic results of a search engine results page. In this presentation we will talk about what some of the things there are that you can do to have your company show up at the top of results for your keywords.”
7. We briefly recapped what we will consider to be social media and SEO in for the purposes of this presentation – now lets review how you combine their two forces to gain exponential return for your company.“So how many of you ladies in here have a boyfriend? Please raise your hand? Your welcome single guys – I just made your job a lot easier after this presentation. Lets say that your boyfriend has planned a boys night out at the Braves game this coming weekend . You have known about it for weeks but guess what happens that Friday? One of your girlfriends calls you up and mentions she has a free ticket to the braves game and its an awesome seat. Not so reluctantly, you oblige. And guess who you run into at the Chophouse knocking back a few with his buddies? You guessed it – your boyfriend! You can imagine how pissed he is at this point that on his night out you show up.To make up for that indiscretion you decide to book dinner at a nice restaurant.
8. So where do you go to look up that restaurant? To look one up you go to the Google machine and type in “best restaurants in Atlanta” .And guess what? The results are SOCIAL MEDIA BASED! Google is pulling from different sites like their own review network and kudzu and cityvoter, urban spoon etc. Many consider those sites to be directories and not social media but if conversations are happening which they are ( reviews ) and you aren’t involved it could damage your reputation on those sites AND hurt your google results.“Why did all this come about? Google was scared shitless that people would start getting their information from Facebook, think about it – where would you rather get a recommendation for a new restaurant – google? Or a friend? Right so that's why google cares so much about getting the reviews to help you make a decision - they don’t want you to rely on Facebook.”After looking at the restaurant options you decide on the Sun Dial – great views and good drinks, hopefully those two combined will get Brian’s mind off of your transgression from the night before.
9. So once you have decided on Sun dial as your top choice you do a bit more digging on it..Well as you can see, Google is taking all of of your reviews into account when showing the search page. You can bet your bottom dollar that if your company has a bunch of negative reviews across the web it will be less inclined to display your restaurant at the top of the results!”“Also think about this from a user experience, people will be FAR more likely to book a reservation with you if there are tons of glowing reviews. Now, I have used a restauarant as an example here but this applies to all B2C companies for the most part. Make sure that you are soliciting your good customers for reviews because we all know that the pissed off customers are always the ones most likely to lend their voice online”.<> Use Direct Tv example – go solicit your customers for good reviews before they get pissed so you have good review from them
10. “A way to engage your customerswhile they are still happy is the following – we did this for a client – countertop company– we made printouts for their offices with enticements to leave a review with a QR code that the customers could scan at the counter that would take them directly to the review site.”Put kudzu and yelp links on your website to show customers the easy way to review you.
11. “Now I would like to switch gears for a second. We just discussed how reviews play into search engine rankings – lets’ now move onto how we can simply affect our search engine rankings for by solely utilizing social media sites that don’t necessarily include review sites.“ A large part of the new Google algorithm takes into account how active you are on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and mostly Google Plus. SO make sure you are active on the major social media sites and posting great content, not just content for the sake of content. Google can tell how many times your content is being re-tweeted, shared, and commented on . No comments probably means you are a loser and will have the adverse reaction you were looking for.
12. >> Ask Caity what to put in here?“Most of you are already writing great content and posting it to your blog – hopefully at least weekly.“A phenomenal way to use the power of Facebook’s reach in conjunction with the content you area already posting is to make sure that you link your blog and Facebook together. Doing so will make sure whenever you post a new blog article on your website it will immediately go to your facebook and the other social media sites’ fans as well. It is pretty simple to link the blog and social media together if you are using wordpress platformA tip to remember is that you want your blog headlines to be catchy and engaging because your FB fans will be seeing it and you want a high click through rate.
13. >> Insert promoted post image Then promote the post as soon as the blog launches. You post about your , and someone loved a kitty on there and linked from their blog, backlinks are huge for search engine rankings so now you just added vierwership for your blog AND drove a new backlink which is going to help your search engine rankings.
14. “Who here loves the Game of Thrones? Yeh, so do all of us at the Cardinal Nest. So much so that we created this info graphic about how it relates to our industry. Well, it got retweeted by none other than Bing .You can imagine how much weight it would carry with the search engeine algorithm to have a business in the same industry with that much clout re-tweeting you. Google can see all of this and gave our site a huge rankings boost for the social signal link juice sent our way from this post. Kind of ironic that a post that Bing gave love to would also benefit Google.
15. “So who here has heard of Google+?Yes I know it’s a pain in the ass to update G+ and no one uses it but Google employees’ bonuses are tied to it and Google has specifically said what you do on there affects your rankings.SO make sure you are active on the major social media sites and posting great content, not just content for the sake of content. Google can tell how many times your content is being re-tweeted, shared, and commented on . No comments probably means you are a loser and will have the adverse reaction you were looking for.
16. “One thing to remember regarding your blog is to make sure you have google authorship setup by linking your blog and your google plus profile. Doing so will ensure you have a profile picture show up in the serp and increase your ctr by as much as 10-20%”
17. >>Post blog posting of interview“I told you when I started the presentation that I would give you specific things to take back today. Well if you haven’t gotten shit out of this yet pay attention for the next two slides and then go back to facebooking,twatting, or whatever else you are doing on your phone.“A great way to get social media mentions for your website is to take people’s vanity and ego into consideration. Go interview someone famous in your industry and post it on your blog. Guess what they will do? They will promote their fantastic interview that resides on YOUR website through THEIR social media channels? Yes, as you guessed – Google will see these link backs and mentions to your website and will contribute to raising your rankings in search!”
18. “Now this is the more traditional way of using guest blogging to raise rankings. We do this kind of stuff all the time. Go back to your office and create a wonderfully insightful article on yoru industry. Now go and find some great blogs in your industry and reach out to their webmaster offering to post it to their blog with a backlink to your website. Make sure to mention it is unique content that is no where else on the web and will stay that way, meaning, you wont distribute it after they post it. The webmaster is grateful because you are doing their job for them in that they don’t have to create content for that week.If you have trouble getting in touch with webmaster through the sites try connecting with them as if they were an actual human. Find their twitter and FB handles and message them there. Become their friend and you never know, they could ask you to provide regular content for months to come.”
19. “We have talked about a number of ways to promote your company through combing social media and SEO. One futher way to tie it all together is to engage with your target market where they are the most. A lot of your customers will be talking about issues and topics that are inhtersting on your idnstury on various blogs and forums and social media sties. Linked in discusisons are huge. Being an active community member will increase your visibility to these potential customers. Once they see you as a industry expert it will snowball into many others becoming interested with your content.People that you interact with on social media and forums wil begin to search for you and they willthere fore find your company through seeing your gogoelauthrosip tied into the search engine results page..l. You can bet that once they need yoru services they will come to you first as you have already built a lot of trust with themj.
20. “Finally, after you have done all of the tactics we have discussed here, you will be driving tons of new traffic to your website. It will behoove you to analyze traffic deata to see where the best visits and custoemers are coming from. If you notice that your visitors form Twitter have the lowest bounce rate and highest average time on site than you know to do more promotion and content updaters on Twitter.
21. “Thank you all so much for hearing me talk about all of this fun stuff. Keep doing awesome work marketers!