The document discusses using social media signals for SEO. It finds that social shares correlate with search rankings, though Google says social signals are not directly used in its algorithm. Content that performs well socially through sharing and links also tends to rank well in search. The document explores monitoring social media for content ideas and keywords using tools like Tellagence. It recommends creating sharable content that spreads widely to gain links and visibility, and using influencer marketing to amplify sharing. Social media provides a source of natural language for optimizing content as search engines like Hummingbird understand language better.

1. Social-SEO Content
Strategy:
Ideas for a Data Driven Approach

2. Why Does Social Media
Matter in SEO?
COPYRIGHT 2013 CATALYST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. APRIL 29, 2014 | PAGE 2

3. There is a correlation with social
shares and rank
• Moz 2013 Study:
– Page Authority has the highest correlation with rank
followed by Google +1s, # of LRDs, and then # of
Facebook shares.
• Searchmetrics 2013 Study:
– Google +1s have the highest correlation with
rank, followed by Facebook Shares, then # of
backlinks.
COPYRIGHT 2013 CATALYST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. APRIL 29, 2014 | PAGE 3

4. Searchmetrics Correlation Study
0.16
0.18
0.2
0.25
0.28
0.29
0.31
0.33
0.34
0.34
0.34
0.4
0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25 0.3 0.35 0.4 0.45
Length of URL
% Backlinks with Stopword
Θ SEO-Visibility of backlinking URL
% of rel=nofollow backlinks
Tweets
Pinterest
Facebook Likes
Facebook Comments
Facebook "Total"
Number of Backlinks
Facebook Shares
Google +1
Mean Spearman Correlation
COPYRIGHT 2013 CATALYST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. APRIL 29, 2014 | PAGE 4
Source: Searchmetrics, SEO Ranking Factors – Rank Correlation 2013

5. Google Doesn’t Use Social Signals as
Part of Its Ranking Algorithm
Correlation ≠ Causation
“If you make compelling content, people will link to it, like it, share it
on Facebook, +1 it, etc. But that doesn't mean that Google is using
those signals in our ranking.”
–Matt Cutts
In other words…Content that performs well on social media is the
same kind of content that performs well in search.
– SHARABLE content does well: This is content that gets shared
on social media and accumulates backlinks.
– Social sharing AMPLIFIES content: social shares improves
content visibility, getting in front of more eyes.
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6. How Social Shares Affect
Links
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7. Correlation 2
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Social Shares to Linking Root Domains
Anonymous
Client
Data
Nice
Correlation
Correlation:
0.900850699

8. Keyword Usage & Rank: Low Correlations
Moz 2013
0.12
0.12
0.13
0.13
0 0.05 0.1 0.15
Keyword Usage
in H1
Keyword Usage
in Body Text
Body Text
Similarity to
Keyword
Keyword Usage
in Title Tag
Searchmetrics 2013
0.03
0.11
0.11
0.12
0 0.05 0.1 0.15
Keyword in
Domain Name
Keywords in
Body
Keywords in
External Links
Position of KW
in Title
COPYRIGHT 2013 CATALYST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. APRIL 29, 2014 | PAGE 8

9. Create Sharable Content!
• Keywords have been devalued
– Create content that is optimized for search and
social, but mostly social.
• Shareable content is more important
– Content spreads more easily with the advent of
social networks and shareable content (with the
help of social media) will get you more links
COPYRIGHT 2013 CATALYST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. APRIL 29, 2014 | PAGE 9

10. Why People Share?
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11. Upworthy has a Pretty Awesome Process
COPYRIGHT 2013 CATALYST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. APRIL 29, 2014 | PAGE 11
Source: Slideshare & Upworthy
Page Authority: 66
46 LRDs from Authoritative
Websites
• Content = Embedded
YouTube Video
• A few words of on-page
text and a headline
• Ranks Page 1 for “monkey
experiment” and “fairness
experiment”
• Text not found on
page or in anchor text

12. Things We Can Do Similarly
• Test headlines on social
– Upworthy creates 25 headlines and does a lot of testing
– Treat SEO as an iterative process
• Test headlines on AdWords to see how search
differs
• A/B test sharing button and other page aspects
• Differ title, h1, open graph titles, twitter
cards, schema
• Do research and optimize content for our audience
COPYRIGHT 2013 CATALYST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. APRIL 29, 2014 | PAGE 12

13. Influencer Marketing for SEO
• Distribute your content, better. Get it shared
more.
COPYRIGHT 2013 CATALYST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. APRIL 29, 2014 | PAGE 13
Image via David Armano

14. Create content that influencers like
• Use a platform like Appinions to cater content
creation to industry influencers to make it more
sharable
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15. Get Shared By Being First
• Blab: Predict content trends and needs
72-hours in advance
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16. Introducing…
Google Hummingbird
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17. What is Hummingbird?
“With more complex queries, the algorithm can better
understand concepts vs. words as well as relationships
between concepts.”
-Amit Singhal
• An infrastructure change to the Google search
engine, allowing for different inputs and new
algorithms to be developed.
• Part of the infrastructure is a better
understanding of speech through NLP, utilizing
the co-occurence of synonyms and semantic
relationships.
COPYRIGHT 2013 CATALYST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. APRIL 29, 2014 | PAGE 17

18. Why Hummingbird Matters
• Hummingbird opens Google to new
algorithms, utilizing new inputs
– Social Media Inputs
• Hummingbird and mobile phone usage will
change how people search
– Moving to a more speech-like query
– As peoples’ search behavior changes, we will have
less of an idea about how they search with
keywords because of not provided
COPYRIGHT 2013 CATALYST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. APRIL 29, 2014 | PAGE 18

19. Searches Are Always New Anyway
• We Should Produce More Content to
Accommodate New-to-Google Searches
– 15 percent of all queries are entirely new in terms of
either syntax, typographic variation, or emerging
topic, and they had never been entered into a
Google search before
(2013, Think With Google)
COPYRIGHT 2013 CATALYST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. APRIL 29, 2014 | PAGE 19

20. How to come up with
content ideas from social
media (not provided) while
capitalizing on its natural
language (hummingbird)
COPYRIGHT 2013 CATALYST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. APRIL 29, 2014 | PAGE 20

21. Introducing Tellagence: a tool that
extracts keyword data from Twitter
COPYRIGHT 2013 CATALYST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. APRIL 29, 2014 | PAGE 21

22. Some Keywords Tellagence
Came-Up With:
Keyword Occurrences
miss 1148
fat 569
cold 297
captain 297
talking 286
phone 265
winter 452
service 153
COPYRIGHT 2013 CATALYST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. APRIL 29, 2014 | PAGE 22
Fast and easy
content & keyword
insights beyond
what is accessible
with standard
keyword research
tools

23. • “miss” – People missing friends they made on their cruise
– Content: How to stay in touch with cruise friends so you don’t
miss them as much.
• “fat” – people concerned with weight gain on cruises
– Content: How to not gain weight and enjoy yourself on a cruise.
• “captain” – people discussing who the captain is on their
cruise ship.
– Content: Do you have bio pages for your cruise captains? You
should.
• “talking” – people actively discussing (“talking”) with loves
ones and friends about potentially taking a cruise.
– Content: Create content to help aid this part of the sales cycle.
• “phone” & “service” – people saying they will be out of
touch, away from phone because they won’t have service
– Content: Is it true that you won’t have service? Convince people
to use phone on board.
• “cold” & “winter” – people want to go on Caribbean
cruises when it becomes cold in the winter locally
– Content: Winter or cold weather cruises and cruise deals.
COPYRIGHT 2013 CATALYST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. APRIL 29, 2014 | PAGE 23

24. COPYRIGHT 2013 CATALYST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. APRIL 29, 2014 | PAGE 24
Winter Cruises
cruises to escapes cold weather

25. Mining Quora
• Subscribe with RSS feeds (or use Gdoc):
http://www.quora.com/Cruises/rss
COPYRIGHT 2013 CATALYST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. APRIL 29, 2014 | PAGE 25

26. Social Language = Natural Language
• The keywords and language extracted by
social tools is very natural and very
conversational.
– Remember our friend Mr. Hummingbird? Social
language should theoretically help us optimize for
him, because it is written conversationally.
COPYRIGHT 2013 CATALYST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. APRIL 29, 2014 | PAGE 26

27. Summary
• Create sharable content; It gets more backlinks
and is more important than keyword
optimization
• Amplify sharing with influencer marketing
• We can use social media to mine natural
language information to optimize content for
Hummingbird
COPYRIGHT 2013 CATALYST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. APRIL 29, 2014 | PAGE 27

28. Thank You!
Paul Shapiro
@fighto