Q&A: Lee Odden on the Evolution of Social Media and Search
October 3, 2011
In a recent podcast, we chatted with Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Online Marketing, about some of the steps companies can take to improve their overall SEO and social media strategies. The following Q&A includes some additional insights from Lee that didn’t make it into the final podcast. Read on for more information on how social media has evolved in search and some of the top reason why companies fail at SEO.
Don’t forget to check out our full podcast with Lee: Do You Need an SEO Audit?
Q: One of the topics you discussed at Content Marketing World was the connection between social media and SEO. Could you elaborate on how that process has evolved, and the role social media now plays when it comes to search engine optimization in Google and the other big search engines?
Lee Odden: Sure. One of the things about search and social that often happens is SEO folks have traditionally used social media networking sites as a way to draw links and to attract traffic in such a way that . . . well, attract attention to a particular piece of link bait or something like that. Such that it maybe hit the home page of Digg or promoted on Reddit or Delicious or StumbleUpon or something like that, which exposed that content to a whole group of folks, some of which would be willing to link to our target content.
What’s happened though is I think more and more folks in the SEO world are seeing the value of actually developing community and focusing on engagement metrics. Engagement metrics are a proxy to this notion of building a community so that not only are they engaging and developing this whole notion of super users so people can promote content so that it attracts links, but they’re actually investing in developing community in different social channels. That’s a pretty valuable thing obviously, because if you have content that’s really great and it’s relevant for a particular audience and you’re able to share it with the community — if a community exists in the first place — then now you have people actively looking for the next thing you have to promote. If it’s relevant and good stuff, then they’re going to share it. That’s a more sustainable approach to leveraging social from an SEO perspective than simply trying to engage with power users that have a lot of authority and you can buy basically popularity.
A: How does that approach to leveraging social in search pertain to specific search engines?
Lee: Google and Bing, as you know, have admitted to using social signals, meaning that links contained within social updates like from Twitter or Facebook, public Facebook content, as potential signals for ranking content organically. So I think you kill two birds or many birds with one stone by — as an SEO person — understanding the kind of content that resonates with the particular audience you’re after.
[It’s about] using keywords in social topics as a way to inspire the content you’re creating as well as the social network development that you engage with, so that you can put a plan together that’s very content-centric, very customer-centric, and actively create content that people are interested in, that they’ll engage with, and that they’ll maybe act upon from a conversion standpoint. If they’re not ready to buy, but act in terms of a social sharing perspective so that it propagates amongst the community, you can then track links that will in a secondary way help your search engine visibility because Google and Bing will identify and see those links and count them as signals, if that make sense.[h3]More on Keyword Research
For an in-depth look at how to improve your company’s keyword research strategy, download our free eBook: Better Keywords, Better Customers: A Business Guide to Keyword Generation.[/aside] So it’s kind of a cycle, I think, of understanding what it is that your audience wants, giving it to them. I also think understanding that there’s a big difference in social between the customers that are going to buy your stuff and the influentials that are out there that can be your biggest asset if they buy into whatever it is that you’re promoting. Social participation in terms of who you are trying to engage isn’t just about end buyers obviously, but also those people who have communities of their own. If you get their endorsement or recommendation, that could be priceless in terms of sending the kind of traffic that will actually convert. Lee: I’m a big believer in effectiveness and efficiency, and not a lot of companies have unlimited marketing budgets, so they’ve got to prioritize where they spend their time. Some of these fails come into play in regard to wasting time. So one example would be chasing shiny object keywords. Oftentimes, we call these ego keywords. An executive for a company will decide in their own mind that keyword XYZ or 123 are really what they stand for, and this is really important for them to have visibility because their peers give them crap about not ranking for that phrase or who knows why. But ultimately that phrase may not drive conversions, and so wasting time on phrases that are extremely competitive, marginally relevant, is just that, a waste of time, or can be a waste of time. [Instead, it’s about] going after phrases that are more indicative of a buyer that’s near a decision and their queries include pricing information, or their queries include very specific attributes or other signals that would be an indication that they’re ready to buy. It’s just a matter of them determining exactly which vendor to get it from. Long tail phrases sometimes is where these kinds of queries will fall into. So that’s one fail. Another one would be relying too much on free tools. If you’re an agency in the business of consulting, or if search is a huge, huge part of your customer acquisition strategy, I don’t know that I’d rely too much on a bunch of free tools. What if they go away? What if they don’t work or there is some compromise in their data or whatever? I just have this belief that paying for tools is a good thing because you have some recourse. There’s usually support. There’s a business model that supports this tool, and there’s some reliability and recourse for you if you need things to be fixed. Another problem is lack of training; not training your staff on SEO best practices or not sharing things like keyword glossaries across different folks in your organization or departments that are in a position to create content. For example, a lot of times SEO and social are siloed in an organization. Public relations is responsible for social in many cases, and SEO is managed by marketing. One lost opportunity is when they don’t cross train and share resources between each other. Keyword glossaries are a good example of that. Keyword glossaries that social media teams could use for example or public relation folks writing press releases, case studies, testimonials, and that sort of thing, contributed articles on guest blog posts — most PR people would benefit from having an idea of what phrases are most popular and relevant. Don’t forget to check out our full podcast with Lee, where he discusses the steps to planning an SEO audit, the link between social media and search, and some of his favorite SEO tools for businesses.Q; Another really interesting topic from your Content Marketing World presentation involved some of the ways people and companies fail at SEO. Could briefly go over just a couple of different things that people still do wrong when it comes to search engine optimization?