Search and Social: A Happy Marriage

Cara Wiggins Gray

Manager, Digital Marketing Analytics and SEO at Reliant Energy

Topics for discussion

• What influences a higher search ranking – the bigger picture

• How social media and search are related • How to maintain a good relationship

between the two • What does success look like? (how to

measure and report)

3 Pillars of SEO

Forbes.com

content marketing (n.): a way of connecting brands with audiences on their own terms via

shared interests.

content marketing isn’t hunting and we don’t “capture” audiences.

we hunt for shared interests, then we captivate audiences.

Social becoming bigger part of SEO

Discoverability | Social SEO

Know the impact of social signals • Search engines have started to use social signals (likes, comments, reviews, shares, etc.) to

help filter out noise and determine what is valuable on the web

Ensure content is relevant

• Utilize individual platform targeting options to get the right message to the right people at the right time

• Create hyper-relevant advertising messaging through geographic, demographic and psychographic audience segments

• Irrelevant content (content that is ignored or flagged for spam) could have a negative impact • Evaluate post analytics and learn and optimize over time to create the most relevant content

Keep keywords in mind • Incorporate top search keywords into social content to ensure social content appears in relevant

searches

Tying social to SEO More on Social Signals

• Number of Facebook shares

• Number of Twitter followers

• Number of tweets mentioning your brand name or including a link to your website

• Number of people that “have you in their circles” (Google+)

How Social Listening can Improve SEO Keyword insight through Radian6

Highlight top posts and shows top keywords coming out of those posts

Based on targeted keywords, can show you the posts and sentiment around those keywords to gain insight.

Keywords and their insight from social listening can inform content

refresh and maintenance, which is needed to rank well for site

Maintaining good SEO/Social Practices

Ensure your content is updated on social platforms along with site content – be consistent with messaging across your digital presence.

Make social sharing easy

The importance of images

Social Media Listening • Social media generates a significant volume of

data from customers and potential customers about the energy industry, the brand, as well as specific events and campaigns.

• With a substantial volume of data pulled in each month, much of it is of little consequence and is often viewed as “noise.”

• The social media team is challenged with the task of filtering through the data and analyzing to derive actionable meaning.

• By analyzing this data, we can see how social media influences consumer behavior, gain a better understanding of brand reputation, as well as learn how we can better serve our customers or shape our messaging to attract new customers.

• The purpose of our listening reports is to provide a high level overview of conversations around the brand in social media each quarter.

Radian6 Listening Platform

• Intelligence about online conversations is critical. We need to know what’s being said about our brand, industry, and competitors online.

• Radian6 is the platform we use to listen, measure, analyze and report on these conversations.

• Radian6 is a Salesforce.com company.

• Metrics: buzz, sentiment, topic trends, conversation clouds (keywords), media type, hashtags and usernames mentioned, Twitter demographics, and influencers

• Media: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, blogs, forums, and mainstream news.

• Historical Data: We have access to social media conversations and data over the past five years.

Measurements and Reporting

Metrics: • incoming traffic • keywords driving traffic • social media engagement through campaign

tracking

Success Stories