Social Media Can Kill Your SEO Efforts

Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Google, Yahoo and more all are, or have, social networking components. Many brands, shops and individuals are jumping on the social media bandwagon and trying to market as best as they can through the next biggest thing on many on these platforms. What often isn’t being taken into account is the harm social media could be doing to your brand.

Social media is fun, engaging and deceptively easy to get in to but difficult to market over effectively. Due to the ease and simplicity of the platform, it can seem at times as though everyone who can log on has become a social media marketing expert. The ease of entry belies the difficulty in engaging appropriately which has been exemplified in the past with Habitat UK, Vodafone UK and countless other social media gaffes that do sometimes irreparable brand damage.

Social media brand damage can go on to impact your brand online as CNN and Eurostar both experienced. When searching on “Welsh couple Mumbai” and related terms, the false story that CNN put a couple’s life at risk dominated the search results. Even though this was false, social media enabled the fake story to be picked up and repeated as commentary and news in countless other blogs. Search results for both brands became affected.

Social media problems resulting in unfavourable search results then becomes a reputation management issue, sometimes even requiring professional SEO help as the search results become polluted with negative messages about your brand. In this way, and others, social media can harm your SEO efforts, making it even harder to present a clean brand image in the SERPs (search engine result pages).

Social media can also help your brand. Engaging over social media, including commenting on blogs, tweeting, blogging and other methods of social media engagement can not only improve SEO but also help build positive brand engagement, creating passionate advocates who can be activated when something does go wrong. Having a bloggers launch of a product as well as a media one can result in more column inches, more buzz and higher rankings. This also helps with cleaning up bad search results as positive buzz pushes out negative buzz.

Social media itself also helps SEO through link building and citations. Each mention without a link as well as each link all goes into the big algorithm on calculation and results in higher rankings. While a link helps more, a mention still helps with relevancy, trust and authority. Links from social media do help and count so positive buzz about your brand will help your SEO, rather than harming it.

Ensuring your social media efforts are targeted and focused is important as well. Creating relevancy or relationships with unrelated products or words will not help your SEO efforts. If you sell biscuits and you target your content at people interested in caravans, while people who caravan may eat biscuits, you will not rank higher for biscuits no matter how many caravan-related links you get.

Social media marketing requires a plan before engaging just as SEO does. Keyword research is the most important thing any site can have done for it in order to better focus efforts and targeting. This keyword list should then be used then engaging through social media. This type of focused targeting means instead of harming your SEO, social media can help your SEO.

Don’t sweat the small stuff with SEO though. Focus on the low hanging fruit and after you have done your keyword research, change title tags to be more targeted, add to your on-page content and ensure links in to the site have keywords where possible. Citations are growing in importance so don’t worry if you don’t get a link – a mention will help.

Social mdia can be as much boon as bane but if you plan properly it can be a huge help.

What It’s Like To Run A Link Agency

Even though we’ve seen massive shakeups in the link building world lately, links are still what a lot of clients want. Link building is our main business (so that’s lucky for us) but when we have quoted projects where link building takes a backseat, no one is interested. Due to excessive client demand, more and more SEOs (and people with zero experience who see the chance to get in there by doing something that honestly does not require excessive knowledge) are getting into links. In many cases this means that they say they build links, but in reality, they outsource that to someone like us. In some cases, it’s a lot of idle talk from people who think that it’s easy work and stop doing it after they get a proper link building job. In other cases, we’re hearing a lot of chatter from people who don’t have any real link building clients.

I am here to tell you that link building is a practice, not a theory. It’s maddeningly tedious work and I never intended to run a link agency, but hey, here I am, and I do quite love it. I just don’t like to see something so difficult and painstaking become glamorous because I don’t think that it’s an honest portrayal of the reality of working as a link builder or running an agency.

For example, there’s the issue with my own beliefs and opinions vs keeping people employed. I’ve turned down one client due to thinking that what he wanted me to promote was extremely unethical, but I also take on clients that might bother someone else but don’t happen to bother me. We are extremely lucky to have enough work to keep all of us employed but if I lost half of my revenue, would I take on a client like the one I turned down, if it meant keeping all of my people employed? He’s a bad example as what he does for a living is something that I consider to be life-threatening behavior, but let’s say I didn’t believe in the politics of a certain group (like the Republican Party.) If they offered me $10k a month and the alternative to taking that client was firing 4 link builders, I’d like to think that I would take it. It would make my dad happy at least.

Managing an agency like this is also quite different to doing the link building itself, as I’m lucky in many ways that my days are not spent chasing link targets. However, the idea of not having to bear the responsibility for all of it is quite appealing at times. I have a great office manager and some seriously kick-ass staff, but I still can’t truly turn off when I go on vacation. Clients still email me, people still have questions about their hours/need time off/want my opinion, and the buck definitely stops here. I’ve worked for people who would throw me under a bus to make themselves look blame-free but I’m not that kind of person, which means I usually stress out over just about everything. I’m the one a client will bitch to if they hate what we’ve done, and I’m the one who will lose money if they refuse to pay. I’m the one whose reputation is screwed if I really mess up.

How much to educate? How to recruit? These are tough questions. We don’t hire experienced link builders because, well, we’ve never actually interviewed anyone with link building experience. We train everyone in-house and everyone gets the exact same basic training whether they go to work for our link team or our content team. Some of them are interested in SEO, some of them don’t give a crap. As long as they perform to the standards we’ve set for each person, I truly don’t care. I LOVE it when someone expresses an interest in SEO though, and I love answering their questions and seeing them get excited about something that I feel quite passionately about, but I also understand that to some people, a job is just a job. Recruiting, when we work this way, is also a bit tricky as it’s hard for us to know what to look for until the person walks in the door and talks to us. Sadly, we aren’t a profitable enough agency where I could offer a competitive experienced SEO salary, but hey, why would anyone like that want to crank out link requests and write guest posts all day? Our hiring, even though I complain here and there, is one of the things that I am happiest with, as while I could not lay out what it is about a person that makes me want to hire him or her, I just kind of feel it.

And ah, all that extra time for me to spend researching since I have to keep 20 people plus the clients informed…yeah that is fun. Honestly, it IS fun, but it’s a lot of work. If a client calls my mobile and asks about the latest update that was just written about 30 minutes ago, I better know about it. If we do anything that gets totally devalued by an algorithmic update, I need to put the brakes on asap and regroup. I sometimes spend 75% of my day reading articles, talking to other SEOs about things, or writing (and doing my best to make sure no one else has just written the exact same thing.)

Being responsible for the brand when I am not the only one controlling it is also problematic at times. I’m very lucky that this is not a current issue but we’ve had clients who worked with other agencies for various things (including different types of link building other than what we were doing) but when rankings dropped, guess who got blamed? That’s right. We’ve been blamed, we’ve had clients leave in a huff, and we’ve had to figure out problems caused by OTHER people working on the accounts. It’s hard enough to figure out where you’ve gone wrong, but figuring out where someone else did…that’s a serious pain, and it eats up loads of time.

Lest you think it’s all sadness and rain here, I will say that running an agency is still something that I love. At its worst, it’s still not as bad for working for someone else who’s a total jerk. I recently had dinner with a friend and former colleague at a place where we used to work, and she said that she had no idea of how bad that place was until she was free of it. It was honestly like an abusive relationship where you later wonder why you let that guy smack you around. If our kids have a school performance, we’re there. If we need to do something non-work related on a Friday, we can do it (although we usually pay for it Saturday or Sunday nights) and that is very important to me, having children and a dog and a cat and a rabbit and chickens. Something is almost always going wrong somewhere, and if we had to work a strict 9 to 5 M-F schedule, there’s no way we could survive. To me, all the hard work pays off. It’s just not easy. We’ve made massively stupid decisions, had horrible tax issues our second year (due to not knowing what we were doing the first year), had personal financial stress because we’re self-employed and even though the company does very well, we’re still SELF-EMPLOYED, which seems to kind of screw you in the eyes of some banks. (I’m not sure how that is any worse than working for a company where you have no say and can easily be fired, but whatever.) None of us have formal business training (actually one of my employees is about to get her MBA so I may hassle her a bit more) but we’ve learned as we’ve gone along, and we’re still learning.

If that’s the kind of life you want, go for it…just don’t underestimate what it takes to succeed and to stay successful.

Beef, Arsenic and Web Analytics – Getting the Right Numbers

Have you ever listened to the news reporting the latest study about how dreadful things have become or what the latest item likely to kill you is and found yourself thinking how can that be true?

Did you ever then consider the elements behind the report? Or did you, like the journalists and talk show hosts, wonder how it’s all come to this?

I think it’s time we all started thinking more critically about numbers and rocking the right ones! Whether it’s numbers in the news, or, more importantly, numbers in the reports you’re looking at in another window right now, have a second thought about them and see what you think.

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Welcome Anna Lewis to the SEO Chicks blogging team!

I would like to officially welcome Anna Lewis to the SEO Chicks blogging team. Anna is a Digital Marketing Executive at Koozai, she has a degree in Advertising and a passion for SEO and particularly analytics. This girls gets numbers! When I first met her at a meet up event in London it soon became clear that Anna LOVES what she does, she is super enthusiastic and passionate. Just the kind we like at SEO Chicks. She is also the right kind of crazy, which is a must to be on this blogging crew.

We are honoured to have her in our blogging team and we’re looking forward to reading her posts. Welcome Anna!

Follow Anna on Twitter and G+

Optimising Your Site for Link Building

As SEOs we optimise for many things (clue’s in the job title, right?) – but increasingly it occurs to me that we’re missing a trick or two when it comes to link building.

I don’t want to get into a paid linking debate here – whether you choose to buy links or not is up to you. But the truth is, if no one will link to you unless you pay them, then you have problems.

Big-ass ones.

Here’s a little Smörgåsbord of issues that I frequently see that make sites sub-optimal for link building.

 

1) Your site is so ugly it makes my eyes bleed…

Yep, I said it. I’m shallow. Human beings are.

Psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania studied data from over 10,000 speed daters and found that most people make a decision regarding a person’s attraction within three seconds of meeting.

I’m guessing that post your beautifully personalised, witty and clever outreach email – should you reach first base (in this instance let’s say first base is your lovely link target clicking through to go visit your site) your site has approximately 3 seconds to woo said target. (more…)

Stating a Case for SEO Budget in Business to Business Sectors

If you’re immersed in a particular industry it can be difficult sometimes to see outside of your own bubble. At theMediaFlow we’re a very small, self-funded SEO agency and because of that we’ve always gotten our business entirely by referral or by incoming enquiries from customers who have found us through search or by reputation. In all those cases of course we’re “preaching to the converted”. What I mean by that is that our customers come to us already aware of the benefits of investing in SEO. Forgive me then for forgetting that in many businesses and in many sectors, SEO is still relatively untried, unknown and yet to feature on the marketing agenda.

Last week I chaired a number of round table discussions at Econsultancy Digital Cream B2B. A recurrent theme from participants to the Integrated Search discussions, was the difficulty in quantifying and justifying budget for organic search, when already using paid search. Paid search is instantly quantifiable, with clear and immediate ROI data. In organisations that may have some history, are primarily “bricks and mortar” or may have numerous and diverse routes to market; organic search may seem like an intangible spend in comparison. Of course that’s not the case, so I thought it would be useful to present some solid data-driven cases for investing in SEO for those using paid search.

Cheese Rolling Cancelled

 

Organic Search Is a Lasting Investment

A good SEO campaign, delivered by a good SEO agency is a lasting investment. Particularly in a business to business environment you’re likely to be producing specialist products that serve a particular business need. Whilst your competition may be tough comparatively within your industry it ain’t car insurance, and provided that your website is fairly solid and your business has a story to tell, there is no reason why a good SEO agency cannot significantly improve your visibility in organic search as a lasting investment. Whilst click-thru rates on organic search results have been declining compared to paid search over the years, most recent studies show that at 52% of clicks this is still the majority. That means that if your budget holders will only approve paid search budget, there’s an additional 52% share of clicks that your business is not even in the running for. My fellow SEO-Chick Julie Joyce of Linkfish Media recommends graphing the rising costs of PPC for your main industry keywords over time so you can quantify the rising costs of participating purely in the paid search pool. This is quite a powerful argument to consider an investment in SEO as this is a much more lasting spend.

Illustrating Value

Of course saying that “SEO is a lasting investment” is all well and good but of course your financial director needs more than the assurances of someone who has made a living out of this for eight years. If you’re already spending on paid search you already have some great data on the keywords that work and convert for your business, plus the ability to demonstrate how click-thru rate increases based on the position of your paid listings. You can either be super cautious and use an average click-thru rate for your paid listings to demonstrate the additional share of clicks available once you have attained the top three spots, or if you happen to already have some organic search presence (perhaps in the less competitive “tail” terms for your sector, or on your brand terms) then you can use Google Webmaster Tools data to look at the organic search click-thru ranges on any terms in which you are already ranking well for.

 

PPC and SEO Work Best Together

In addition to the “me too” benefits to be had from also participating in SEO, there’s some solid case study data on the additional bump in performance metrics across both paid and organic search, when both are used in conjunction. My fellow SEO-Chick Hannah Smith of Distilled agrees that paid and organic search work better together, and pointed me to a talk delivered by Melanie Mitchell of Digitas speaking at Mozcon 2011. In the session Mitchell said that contrary to some conventional wisdom, rather than “switching off” PPC when you rank #1 for a core term there’s actually more bang for the buck to be hand in continued participation in both organic and paid search. In fact in the study she referenced “32% CTR and 420% increase in brand recall when doing organic and PPC together.”

Conclusion

Whilst paid search may deliver instant ROI and quantifiable performance data from the get-go this is a constant click-level cost, which is ongoing and increasing. In most cases if your business has never embarked on a programme of organic search marketing, then the investment required will often tend to decrease over time as the bulk of a lot of technical and on-page optimisation activities will take place in the first months. Your ongoing spend will therefore be related to the technical marketing aspects of organic search, such as linkbuilding, getting your content in front of the right online sources and audiences, and dovetailing your social media presence with your social media strategy. Although it will differ from sector to sector in most B2B sectors the first six months of an organic search campaign will be negative in terms of ROI, as your site begins to gain traction in the search engines, however by around six months onwards your investment will begin to return and to grow significantly for often the same rate of monthly spend. In fact a good SEO agency should be able to help you quantify spend vs return once they know enough about your business, competition and target keywords though beware any agency that offer guaranteed timings, positions and ROI; as that’s just not scientifically possible.

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