It’s always been important to think about tying your marketing strategy together but that’s especially true now in the digital world. One of the most important ways to drive traffic to your website is search engine optimization (SEO). As early as 2009, search engines for Bing and Google started indexing tweet information and Twitter bios through their algorithms, but it’s unclear how many tweets are being indexed or how they specifically tie to SEO. That being said, there’s plenty of opportunity to extend your digital footprint from the social world into the digital one. So where do you begin when digital and social worlds collide?
Consistent language
Most large businesses have created a keyword strategy, but have you applied it to your Twitter bio or the content of your Tweets? In a multi-threaded corporate story, you need to apply your narrative in a thoughtful way across your marketing efforts. Using a consistent keyword and content theme from Tweet to blog post to landing page not only sends a clear and consistent signal to search engines but it also provides your potential customers with consistent messaging at each click.
A Search Engine Land article from July 2015 suggests that only 3.4% of all tweets were being indexed by some search engines, but you can still optimize Twitter assets and align them to your SEO efforts. Here are a few suggestions:
- Look at your personal and brand Twitter bios for both keyword usage and linking strategy. Links to individual bio pages are often places at the top of search results.
- Review how your employees use Twitter. If you have a large staff and everyone shares specific content links, you could drive that page rank higher. Search engine algorithm will associate heavy link sharing with higher quality content.
- Twitter can be amazing for market and competitive research. Determine the common phrases that show up across prospect tweets and bios. Use products like RivalIQ to monitor how competitors change keywords in their Twitter bio. This can validate the keywords you use on your site or surface new opportunities.
- Use tools like Little Bird to understand the unique hashtags that members of an expert network leverage. They may represent new opportunities to create a keyword strategy.
Social Authority and Link Sharing
In the same article, It is also suggested that some indexing strongly favors tweets from people with “Social Authority.” This is where influencers come into play for sharing content. But social authority is not just about follower numbers, “there is a correlation between those with higher engagement levels and overall ‘authority’ and indexing.” That means the more relationships you earn with contextually relevant influencers, the more link sharing might occur, which can have a significant impact on your organic traffic. If influencers write blog posts or articles about you, your product, or event that is even better. About one-third of my company’s digital traffic comes from influencers writing digital content about our solution.
Content Creation
Watching the content created by market influencers to see what’s unusually successful can inspire your own original content creation. Producing high-quality content can impact your search rank through most search engines. Looking at best of breed content can augment the technical and content-related SEO information derived from tools like BrightEdge. This strategy can have a material impact. In “A Tale of Two Stories,” I talk about how my business used this method to write two blog posts that netted us over 40,000 page views in one month and drove our organic traffic up 30% across a 60 day period.
Measure and Test
Like most digital marketing practices, there’s no easy answer, but there is lots of opportunity. With any program, make sure you know what your analytic baselines are. As the only marketer at my company, I spend about 25% of my time doing true “influencer marketing.” These are the metrics I pay attention that relate to SEO:
- Total digital traffic, referral traffic and organic traffic plus their lead contributions
- Rank position on three search terms
- Two pieces of new digital content per quarter from influencers
- Five Influencer social mentions per month
I’ve spent the last 18 months figuring out what influencer, social and SEO tactics work and which ones don’t for my company. Make sure you leave enough time and resources to test for the tactics that will impact your business. We’ve been able to calculate that a lead from our influencer marketing efforts costs us one-third of what we spend in Adwords and the inquiries are always more qualified.
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