For years, the best way to gain rankings in search results was to have:
- Accessible pages featuring
- Quality content
- Targeting the right keywords
- In a way that naturally earned external links
But this changes things:
The cupcake post from Everywhereist normally wouldn't rank there. In fact, unless you follow Geraldine on Twitter, chances are you won't see much of her site in even semi-competitive results. Here's a screenshot of a logged-out view.
Not only is Google annotating the listing with a photo, creating social proof and certainly increasing click-through-rate, they're also biasing to put these results on page 1 that might normally rank in utter obscurity. This isn't just true for obscure, random searches either, nor is it exclusive to Twitter.
"Web analytics" is a highly competitive query, and though they try, KISS Metrics and Market Motive aren't normally ranking page 1 for everyone... but they are for me thanks to my connections to Neil on Quora and John on Facebook.
This should be giving everyone in search marketing a huge "ah ha" moment. As Google scales this out, concentrates on getting more people claiming their profiles and using logged-in accounts to search (supposedly this number was ~20% in March of 2010), the reach of your social network and the sharing you do to those networks will have a substantive, possibly massive, effect on your search traffic. The socialization of search is more than just Tweeted URLs or Facebook Likes or LinkedIn Shares having a positive first/second-order impact on generic rankings, it's about influencing your social graph to see the content you share in their search results.
You can see how you're connected in Google by visiting this page (while logged into your Google account)
Suddenly, a huge social reach is a competitive advantage in SEO. If you're doing SEO today, I think it's no longer possible to ignore the growth of your social connections as a big part of your SEO strategy. Honestly, I expect in 18 months, Twitter followers, Facebook connections, LinkedIn account size and engagement across these won't just be social metrics; they'll be KPIs for our SEO, too.
p.s. I don't mean to suggest these features in Google are new - they've been around a while. But Google's aggressiveness with showing and the user happiness and CTR that predicts, likely means this is here to stay, and will be a part of Google's strategy for a long time. Bing's doing this too with Facebook, and in a much more directly integrated way.
Could this not potentially be a kick in the teeth for agencies? An in-house SEO will belong to just one industry and thus can network and create connections within it, and impact the search results for these connections.
An agency SEO will likely have clients across a variety of different industries and is unlikely to network with people from all of them! I can envisage a situation whereby we no longer offer social media to clients, but demand it from them, as a necessary part of their SEO. I guess we'd also have to set up Google accounts for clients too... going to be needing more staff I think!
Or it'll be an opportunity for your client to be loosely connected with your other clients, improving their reach.
thats great, clients can create a network just by working with your agency. Take it a step further and setup a discount program for business transactions done within the client network.
Not really if you are an agency which has teams which work on different large verticals for example Mobile, Insurance, FMCG...You build contacts within these niches so you can easily network on scale for a whole area and you have a much larger network to work with and much larger contacts to work with
Depends how you look at it. Is there no crossover with mobile and insurance for example? Every industry is replete with contacts, and if you have a whole team working on one vertical, then it should be even easier to spot cross promotional opportunities.
For sure you can have cross over in certian niches, you need to cross use platforms and areas where you can.
I am more looking at the statement made that agency will be at a loss, I don't think that is true what so ever. If you work in a global agency you can leverage alot of content and links.
An increased burden on clients has been growing for many years as content/social become core to SEO. Potential clients don't like it, but it's real. I've lost several proposals recently because I mention the "P" word ("participation") when describing the work we'll do in the project. Suddenly, organizational leadership capabilities are as important as technical SEO. If you can't influence the client's budget, HR, and executives enough to carve out participation among staff, you can't succeed anymore. It's changing how we do business in the Agency world.
This is awesomely insightful!
thanks and keep it coming!
"I envisage a situation where we no longer offer social media to clients, but demand it from them, as a necessary part of their SEO." via @dan_almond is what I wanted to tweet on reading this article and your comment. To condense it further would do your comment an injustice so I'll blog about it and comment here on the article by RandFish :)
Great article RandFish BTW!
For me as a social media media maker and practitioner there has always been a conflict between content channels for the audience preference and multiple copies of postings. I am interested in this convergance in the Force.
Hello
Yep, going to need more staff lol !!! But the reel solution may be to use the staff of a client. I more and more offer SEO training courses especially for e-commerce sites because there are so many things to do a part from site optimisation.
Clients will have to understand that, just like in a shop where they would hire a sales person, the ones who succeed doing SEO on the web are the ones that have trained employees to do the job.
With inbound marketing growing SEO and marketing agencies or marketing employees of large companies are working hand in hand to combine their efforts on weg strategy.
I handle both SEO and social media for small and medium-sized businesses.
I've had great success in pushing some stuff back to the client.
They are the the ones with the industry or trade association connections, do the speaking engagements, etc...
We work together to figure out how to capitalize on these connections. I have someone high up at my client company make the initial contact -- then I follow up with those further down the food chain.
It is very unfortunate that Google is polutting its results through social connections. So all i need to do to rank high for my target audience is let them somehow follow me, befriend me on facebook, connect to me via linkedin. May be a small incentive, special discount or offer may entice them to follow me. So here is my next special offer 'Follow us on twitter or connect to us via facebook and get 10% discount" or wait may be i can come up with the concept of '100 club card points' and free vouchers. Each card point is equivalent to 1 facebook like, +1, tweet or share on linkedin. See how easy it is to manipulate search results now.
This will also make competing with big brands almost impossible as most of them have enormous social media presence or resources to create such presence. Above all i prefer to see fresh unbiased search results. It is highly unlikely that i will buy say pink trousers (which popped up in my search results for some trouser query) because one of my connection bought it. I think Google will never understand how social works.
I'm not so sure I agree with you on this. I think the social connections are going to make it easier for the non-brands to compete, since the small websites usually have no chance of going up against brand websites, such as Best Buy. I think what Rand is getting at, especially with his cupcake example, is that because of social results, the small websites get more exposure.
Also, personally, I am much more likely to click a link to, say, outdoor equipment if a friend of mine has shared the link rather than a big brand.
"This will also make competing with big brands almost impossible as most of them have enormous social media presence or resources to create such presence."
You bring up an interesting point there. It'll be interesting to see how Google treats social influence from big brands vs smaller ones. SEO has always been a way for smaller businesses to compete with the big boys, but honestly I see big brands having the upper hand when they execute a proper social media strategy because of their fat budgets. I definitely agree with dohertyjf that smaller sites will get more exposure though, that they wouldn't have gotten otherwise.
I totally agree
I've been proning that Google is turning into a search popular engine and will no longer be a relevant keyword search engine.
Ok, they put trust into human social links, alt attributes on picures and video to fight spam and black hat seo.
But like you point out it will be even easier to cheat through social media
Just write an article about mentos mixed with coca cola to create a bomb and you'll get thousands of likes on facebook, twits on twitter etc. Then ad a video to boost it even more.
So all I have to do is create a nice blog or site explaining the mixture and I'll rank higher than coca cola itself on keyword like : soft drinks, coca cola cans, coca cola bottles etc...
Ridiculous
People will just get fed up with irrelevant search results that rank well just because of their popularity and won't use Google anymore.
So that's a nice open door for Bing, Yahoo and Blekko for example.
The next five years are going to be very interesting.
This really, really sucks. I can't say how much I hate this. Here's the problem- I'm an SEO, and I'm socially connected to lots of other SEO's. They all like, tweet, share and +1 their content and their client's content. I couldn't care less about most of it. But now my search results will be influenced by it? Not cool.
I get why they do this, it is probably nice for the non-SEO folks out there, but for people like us connected to a bunch of people who share all sorts of different things, this is going to be annoying. Time to bring my laptop to work and do searches from that, while not logged in to Google. That or switch to Blekko, seriously considering it quite honestly...
Yeah, well, we knew it was coming sooner or later. I hope you are right about LinkedIn becoming a mayor player in social search, as at the moment too many people are abusing review sites to rank highly in local.
(However, aklthough it is understandable, it is slightly annoying that even your own recommendations are shown a priority result. I am not senile, I do know what I have shared myself, and wish that I could at least shut this off easily. Hopefully they'll tweak this.)
I totally agree, I think users need to be able to control and configure their 'filter bubble' (to quote Eli Pariser) to avoid getting totally skewed information based on the way these algorythms are set up.
Your post, dear Rand, is the reason why I talk of Social SEO when I explain the need not only to have both an SEO and Social Media strategy, but also - and after your words this is even more justified - a real integration of the two.
Somehow, the effect of social on search reminds me a lot the retargeting tactics in Paid Search. At the end, the substantive effects are the same: to stay always in front of your users. And with more visibilty, more CTR and, hopefuly, more conversions.
Im happy now to have moved from being called a SEO to a Search and Social Manager. Not perfect yet, but much closer to what actually needs to happen. Also a bit more understandable for clients I think
Id encourage SEOs to start pushing for things like this, there is power in titles, especially with clients who dont necessarily understand much about online
I agree Gianluca, the main focus hasn't changed all that much.... except now it's mandatory for all SEOs that haven't been using social in their strategies :-)
Net outcome = a higher barrier to entry for newcomers... and/ or more fierce competition.
I agree with all of you guys, I guess for us SEOs its just the next step in evolution.
I've notice that more and more attention in the SEOMoz community is be given to the social media SEO. I think it's great that it is always in discussion because each day it is becoming more and more important for search engines.
Yes Gianluca you are absolutely right. In the age of Social Media Marketing gives you more result than Traditional marketing. But for paid search always keep in mind target proper keyword and then frame eye-catching add. This gives you more CTR as well as ROI..........
I am so glad I started building my social networks some time ago!
Sorry to disagree with some that say this is going to confuse SEO even more. For me, this is going to weed out some of the 'so-called' SEO's out there and make way for others who can actually make this work for customers.
Embrace it people because it's here to stay and will only get deeper roots as we tread along the SEO path.
Great post as always Rand :)
@searchengineoptimisation.com - the only way Google could do this as I see it: it counts only the connections that are made public on FB. Not every user has the friends list available for bots, logged out users or non-friend accounts.
Anyway, how are the FB profiles for example "ranked" as being important or less important or even spammy? What signals do they have? There are many individuals that "friend" everybody they can, some of my friends have thousands of "friends". This is a concept I don't understand and I think the web broke the real meaning of the word "friend". I only have about 50 friends since I reject the profiles of people I never met or have an important connection with outside FB.
My concern is: how cluttered will be our articles footers in the future? FB Like icon, tweet icon, +1, and so on - all of them competing for user's attention and lowering the usability of the web. Sometimes I feel so relaxed and satisfied when I find an old fashioned article from some dusty website posted in 2001 - just tasty relevant content 100%, no ads, no tons of social icons begging for attention.
The internet... our collective work in progress will evolve over time. We're all going crazy over social right now, but the pendulum will swing the other way eventually.
"dusty website posted in 2001..." good stuff :) awesome... and so true!
This could be quite a cunning way of reducing the impact of spam links. Sure, you can pay your $100 for your 1000 Likes but unless those accounts are followed by a large number of people who are relevant to your target market then it's not going to do squat to your visibility in the search engines.
Very true, people who offer 1000 "Quality" likes or 1000 "Quality" tweets for $20 for example are normally just accounts which have no authority, are from the wrong regions and are 90% of the time just large networks of fake accounts. This is a huge problem on itself Fake accounts on these various social networks.
So if you paid a celeb a few grand for a sponsored tweet. Now anytime one of those millions of followers searches for anything remotely in your field, your site will show up because it was recommended by that celeb(whom they are following)..?
Not exactly so... only if they are logged in Google and owning a Google profile, because it's from there that Google pulls out the social connections you have.
The snapshot in the post is very understandable in this sense.
But my guess it will only be for a short burst if you pay a large celeb to tweet your specific product, my guess is Google will only give you social ranking benefit for a short period, then it will go!
You're right... but you have to think to it really a it was a PPC action into the Social enviroment and, therefore, having an effect in the serps similar to a viral bait.
Not long lasting, but surely useful for brand awareness and instant traffic.
You may only see a celebrety's tweet for a short time, but if any of their followers you know retweet then they will show up, then if you know any of the follower's followers that may retweet they will show up and so on, ad infinitum. The power of the paid celebrity tweet could just have exploded
Great post Rand!
So I guess if you don't want even more crap appearing in your organic search results, be a bit more choosy with who you follow on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social sites. Time to start culling my social circle I guess and clear out the spammers. Ok, that's 95% removed!! ;-)
I think as the integration of social and search is still at the very initial stage, Google is collecting the data and judging user behavior for the impact of the social WOM on search results.
Currently this is being applicable only if you are logged in and the results and opinions are displayed from your social circle. But in future there can be a possibiity that the majority in the collective voice over many social networks infuences the trust rank and domain authority which in a way can indirectly affect the rankings in the long run, as it does act as word of mouth. Social signals and annotations could in the long run become a major off page optimization factor determining trust, authority and quality services of the company.
As, SEO is what you say about yourself , social media is what others say about you. When both the versions are in sync. the credibility and trust is established.
You may say you are the best on your site but when others start saying the same thing in majority over a collective voice it adds more value.
Yes but the trouble is that big brands pay people to creat facebook profils to "like" their brand and share with their "friends".
So black hat social network is on the move and big brands with big budgets will get the most out of it.
True, there is full possibility of this happening but because of the fear of destructive tendencies of people harming the creative pursuits of innovators , innovation and new methods should not come at a standstill.
I had written a blogpost on
If The Likes Are The New Links Then Paid Likes Will Magnify The Spam On The Web
I am of the opinion none of the black hat or spam lasts for long and the search engines sooner or later do come up with a solution.
Big brands have bigger reputation at stake so they better behave. In fact the power of the collective social voice might just ensure that.
Totally Agree, Social is a part of SEO now and we can't do without that!
Rand, you do realise we're all going to be circling you like vultures now... obviously we're going to need to figure a bunch of stuff out for ourselves, but also we're going to be watching and waiting for info from you guys on what strategies could be put in place to make the most out of this... and how to produce measurements for clients (i.e. will ranking reports become obsolete if many people have many connections, personalized search and this seems to suggest it's heading that way).
No pressure or anything hehe ;p
**Future = personalized SERPs**
This is equally interesting from the point of view of how it affects our view of the web, and the world. This book suggests that it will distort all of these things, and not in a good way. I'm not sure I 100% buy the theory, but it's certainly an interesting one.
The intergration of social media by Google has three visible benefits:
1) increased shelf space on SERP's viewed by connections
2) perceived endorsements via connections
3) increased exposure to connections
The big mystery is what impact social media has on rankings seen by viewers with no connections.
"2) perceived endorsements via connections"
Good point... I don't like this!
After reading this and a couple of other similar articles, I was thinking a lot about whether Google has now created incentives to just grab as many followers/friends as possible in order to get wider SERP distribution. At first glance, this does seem to be the case.
I wrote more about it here and would love everybody's thoughts and comments:
Is Google Rewarding People Who "Buy" Friends?
I follow a guy on Google reader, immeadiately I'm connected to his whole social stream: Flickr, pandora, youtube, his personal website, linkedin, facebook, delicious, last.fm, twitter, quora, etc.
Sharing a link on any of these networks would possibly impact my search.
Big implications when those Google Profiles really take off.
Are there any statistics around how many "normal" web users are surfing the internet without having a Google account? Or if they have one if they are logged in all time?
Whilst this is all great I would like to see some rules set in stone by Google in regards to promotion of various areas of Social Search.
I can see many opportunities from Social SEO, and already have numerous strategies in play.. yet I can also see spammers targeting these changes in a huge way.
Will be interesting times ahead for sure...
Great post Rand. It's natural for SEO to be heading (or already headed) in this direction. I think this continues to embrace a more holistic approach of an integrated digital marketing strategy.A lot of clients are asking about a social strategy and being able to build it into the SEO plan is very cool indeed.
Thanks for posting!
With the SERPS so polluted, is there any point in doing a ranking report? Lets face it everyone is getting a bloody different PERSONALIZED views, including the machines you run the ranking reports on! Yes I can go into Webmaster Tools or Google Analytics. How can I present my customers with a ranking report based on anything else, and how do I put this data together? It's nice that Google is offering a BETA to link those two tools together Use this link to apply
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dGo0djB5Z0lDZm00aEdZdnAxdl9uS1E6MA&theme=0AX42CRMsmRFbUy0yOGE2NGFiMi1hMmQ2LTRjZGItODcxOC0yYjg1OWRmMTc1NGE&ifq
We use to use AWR as our ranker, but the results are pretty much useless IMHO.
Do I sound frustrated yes.
Rand I'm begging you guys to let us know the methods we can use, for ranking reports that customers can believe and verify, other than the proverbial TEAM VIEWER on screen demo. I am so tired of having to explain personalized search to every customer.
I was experimenting with:
A) Encrypted.google.search (Perhaps those searches are personalization free)
B) Logging out of my Google Account - Clearing the Cache (Seriously doubt that)
C) Surfing using Google Translate to an english site but flipping the language to french.
D) Google API Keys (Any difference don't know)
Other than Webmaster Tools & Google Analytics are there any answers?
What methods do you recommend for acquiring the Holy Ranking report other than setting up a machine in every Geo-Target on the planet?
I'm all ears.Searchengineman
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I like this because it is going to make websites spend more time thinking about the quality of their online community... Although every websites has a blog, and a place to leave comments, most of those sites ( mine included ) still have a long way to go. I love what seomoz does with the voting system and user blog.
Yes, social signals are playing a key role in Rankings. Somewhere down the lane (like 18 months according to you) when this thing is even more evident, people will start spamming the social networks as well (just like they are dealing with the link building right now). That is what I am really scared off. How differently would you think Facebook, twitter, Quora and other social networks would deal with such a situtation?
Given Rand's 18 month projections, I think any in-house SEO team should consider implementing their own online community, powered of course by facebook/twitter/other social logins. Start converting your large e-mail lists into active community members. Make your communities a "gateway" for the major social media channels.
If your audience doesn't "get social", baptize them. Be the reason they get social.
Thanks for the post.
Any thoughts of how we can see the effect of this in our reporting? Is there a way to use a different campaign code on SERPs that contain social content?
I'm fairly new to the SEO scene and have a quick question. What is the easiest way to get my search results back to organic so that when I'm working for clients I won't be subjected to this personalized search?
Also, I have been thinking about how this might affect keyword research. Should we continue to bother with adding local words such as Dallas in keyword phrases?
If you're not already using Safari, I suggest use Safari and never log into Google. There's a great feature where you can go to edit -> Reset Safari and return all the settings back to a clean install. It clears your history, cache, cookies, etc. so you can get as close to a clean search as possible, with one simple command.
I got tired of personal results in my SERPs, so I use one browser for gmail and my Google tools and stay logged in, use a different browser for searching, and never log in.
Dear Nathan there is no magical process, which give you swift ranking. SEO is slow and steady process.
When you target area specific traffic , it is better to add local words.
its good way to exchange links
I love being able to say I told you so to clients. ;) Actually, most of my clients have gotten on the social media bandwagon, but how wonderful to be able to show them that it is even more worthwhile than they may have thought.
Rand, great post! Thanks for specific data regarding social.
Post is old, but all strategies you discussed will work always.
For those of us logged in using Google Apps, profiles are not available so I wonder if this means I should login to Google with a normal account to start building my social graph or wait til Google makes profiles available for Google Apps accounts, what do you think?
I have one question - it seems silly. Why do Alexa Ranking is so high (some website has ~ 1000) but Google Ranking (PR) = 0 or N/A?
This is one reason why I keep a close on my Klout metrics and added Rapportive to my Gmail account. Hopefully, the guys at Rockmelt will figure out a way to take this new social SEO dynamic and work it into their business model, which could/should make things easier for some of us wanting to provide SMM services to those who don't know or don't have the where with all to ID and engage their growing social circle.
Hooray for Social SEO, I am all for it!
I'm not sure if it fundamentally changes any of the 4 pillars listed at the beginning of the post. If you're making quality content with keywords that's easily accessible and earning links, then more people will find it and be inclined to Like or tweet or +1 or wuphf or whatever.
That said, I realize that having a big network of followers and fans and will now make it easier to get pages to the top of the SERPs for more people faster. But to grow beyond that same network of people who are already connected to you, you need to deliver the goods that new visitors actually think is worth sharing.
Seems like the more things change, the more they stay the same: it's still about who has the best content.
This is obviously a huge game changer. They made such a big deal about the Panda Update. This is even bigger. All those who doubted and avoided social media will be left behind. I guess who you follow really matters because its not just spreading through word of mouth but causing changes in search engine placement. Do you think this will cut down on snakeoil SEO?
The bigger question is if/when Google will iterate through connections. Right now, it appears that only direct connections matter. For example, I am directly following someone on twitter, so I might see their blog post on a certain keyword higher when logged in.
However, my social network is fairly thin (ie: I only am willing to connect to people, places, sites, etc. that I am ALREADY interested and/or tied to). My guess, off the top of my head, is that most commercial searches tend to be for things that are NOT something with which I am already familiar. Sure, I see my connections' content appear when I search for web analytics, but not when I search for a particular product.
I can see this having an impact if I connect with people locally, and they leave reviews for restaurants (for example), but see it having less impact on non-localized terms.
Unless Google decides to start using degrees of separation, whereby the people followed by a person I follow begin to impact my rankings results, and so on and so forth, I think the impact will be limited.
Anyway, very interesting article and well worth thinking about how to manipulate.
In that case Google would have just to buy a product already here: Wajam :)
Rand Great post. It seems that the post from a couple of days ago talking about unpersonalizing Google was essential for research, but more and more search engines are custom-tailoring search results for its users. It compltely makes sense - Google wants to find the most relevant results for each individual user why not show them results for the people they associate with.
I'm confused how Google can be aware I'm friends with someone on Facebook. Is fb connection info public?
You'd better believe it.
According to FB's Privacy Policy
"We generally limit search engines’ access to our site. We may allow them to access information set to the “everyone” setting (along with your name and profile picture) and your profile information that is visible to everyone"
That information includes the people you're connected to.
I'm a little concerned that this could increase the incidence of people getting spammy twitter followers and facebook friends, etc. If I can get thousands of people to follow me on twitter (even if it is via spammy "follow me and I'll follow you" type of networks) then whenever one of those people does a search, my sites are more likely to appear in their search.
Perhaps this will lead to a version where you could sort which friend's opinions you might want to filter in or out? The 20 somethings might like different music than me. The techie friends would have an opinion I would value about which is the next tablet to buy, but no so much someone who just uses it for Angry Birds. Thanks for the article. It answered a couple questions I had, so very useful.
So which social sites are actually being paid attention to by the big three engines besides
1) Facebook
2) Twitter
3) LinkedIN
Whilst not truely social, Quora and Yelp allow you to connect your Google account to them, so I would get yourself busy there :)
Thank you. I have posted to Yelp, but not to Quora. :)
nice info, thanking you
I guess the question must be asked - how long before Keyword Ranking reports are well and truly a thing of the past?
My thoughts exactly, and not a bad thing, I would love for Social SEO to be the norm, it makes so much more sense to me, as a consumer. I feel that so many SEOs forget to think like the customer.
Wait.. It's showing higher rankings for things shared on Twitter, not just from people +1ing it? That's major!
hmmm so which metrics is the best out of the 3? Facebook Share? Tweet? or Google +1? damn it , this makes seo even harder than it already has :(
Same confusion is every where. SEO is becoming harder day by day.
Use all three why limit yourself to only one when competitors will use all 3 + more.
If you're producing content that is getting recognition from readers on any social platform, then I'd take that as a hint that you're heading in the right direction.
I think at the moment a facebook share and tweet are much more valuable than Google +1 because of the lack of google profiles. I would definitely use all 3 though.......and yes SEO is getting way, way harder.
But if my site is ranked well in google place at 2nd position, and one of googler searching for my company services and he didn't even know my company name and hit the keyword with logged in account due to like of his friend of my competitor i will loose my client , is this sound creepy???
It's not creepy, if your company offers a great product and is ranking as number 2, surely Google will display it there no matter how connected people are with friends that liked or tweeted something from your market. They are improving user's search by giving them recommendations from their friends, so this is on a per user basis, which means most of the time you will be where you are, sometimes you might be lower and sometimes you might even go up, depends on who the user is connected to. So for all those that waited for this moment to come and finally hit them in the head (probably running around the office at this moment scratching their heads) this may be alarming, personally, all of us saw this comming. Like Rand said, google and Bing have been doing it for a while now, I included social presence as a high profile ranking influencer in my recent survey for a reason, but hey, most people won't realize it unless they hear it from someone like Rand. Me, going on about it for a few months with no effect, Rand says it and he got everyone's attention.
I love Rand's work and I look up to him, but an SEO that doesn't think with his head and waits for Rand to draw it for them is not an SEO...well, at least not a good one
Yes Zarko Zivkovic you were right i never hurt in my ranking but thier is a question because recommendation make the difference and if google introduced this feature!!!!
It will be interesting to see how much of a factor social signals become. If a user is logged into their Google account while searching, the "real" results might not even show up in their personalized SERP. Will social connections outrank other factors in determining what the SERP looks like?
I'm just not sure how widespread adoption will be. I have a very highly connected community of other SEO/digital marketing types who have been aware of Google +1 for a long time. I do probably 300 searches a day- while logged in to Google- and unless I'm searching for something I know someone is likely to have +1'ed- like a friend's comic book site or "Google Analytics", for example- I'm not seeing this at all. You have to sign up for a Google profile for this to work and unless you want to see personalized search there's no motivation to do so. It's also a fairly kludgy system and could benefit from being more automatic, but no doubt this could also be put to great use for Reputation Management purposes as well.
I think the social results like this have been around for awhile, Google has been testing them, and they bring a good CTR (click-through-rate), so they are promoting them more. I used to see maybe 1 or 2 social results, now sometimes I see 3 or 4 (for trending topics especially). Its an interesting way for Google to keep the organic search results more relevant. However, these are only personalized results, so a good percentage of times this won't happen at all if the user is logged out or doesn't have a Google profile.
This is all part of larger strategy by Google of diversifying their organic search results to give you different rankings based on traditional methods (on-page, links) for the first few results, then maybe a few personalized results based on geography or your social circle, as well as trying out a few new things Google pulls out crazy random articles and sometimes copied search results pages. Search won't be perfect with social but it can be better adding trust factor which is its biggest benefit. They can't read minds yet so they have to give you the choices they think are the best candidates for the answer to your question.
As an agency SEO, I wouldn't call this the elephant in the room, but it's certainly been top of mind for a while. The separation between search and social will only shrink.
I think that this not a big deal if the social connections only go one step. I might have a thousand friends but that is puny compared to the population of searchers.
Now if the social connections go several steps then we are talking some real reach.
A challenge that I have is getting our audience onto social networks. We have quite a few older customers that refuse to get involved with social media for a variety of reasons. Curious to know if anyone has had experience overcoming an audience that doesn't use social.
Chris,
I have had plenty of experience getting clients and upper management to buy into Social Media, and here are a few tips that I can share that has worked for me.
Educate Your Audience
A lot of times, your clients aren't going to do what you want them to do because they don't really know how to it all works, how it relates to their business, how it affects their bottom line, or how it helps their customers. A great way to influence clients is to educate them, especially in how Social Media affects their bottom line AND how their audience sees their company.
Show them that Social Media can help increase their audience's behavior and perception towards the company, which can help build a bigger incoming pool of business to push through their marketing/sales pipeline. Use other available data for measurement if you can find one that suits your needs, and apply that to how your clients can be affected when using that type of marketing.The key thing about education in Social Media is that it's not often a direct relation to the bottom line nor directly measurable, which are 2 key things that I found were very much important to older clientele.
Target Your Selling Point(s) to Their Need(s)
One of the firms I was pitching to had relatively bad experiences with other agencies, especially in the SEO and Social world. However, they weren't as relevant in their online presence to begin with; their brand was not in a great place to compete with their competitors and their needs were more than what their budget could afford. Selling them on Social Media as a way to relatively decrease their marketing cost while increasing their brand awareness (slowly but surely). It was one of the sure-fire ways I was able to get my foot in the door.
Patience Is a Virtue
Educating your clients will not be easy, as they will have questions and pushbacks on why X, Y, and Z will not work for them. When I worked with law firms in social media back in 2006, it took me a good 4-6 months to finally get approval from upper management. That included countless research, numerous conversations (oftentimes repeat conversations from previous days), and mostly just patience to keep answering their questions. Most importantly is educating your clients that they also need to be patient in the results that these campaigns will bring. THAT was a big thing for me to learn back in the day.
Use Other Technology
Social media has its nich in integration into SEO, so you can go through a different route in selling Social Media via other existing technologies and marketing methods. I used SEO and PPC to pitch Social Media to one client a couple years ago, showing them that a full-fledge marketing campaign across the board can provide higher overall ROI and brand awareness in the long-term. Good luck!
We are all by nature social creatures not necessarily digital. Some are more social and with larger circles than others. As with any new concept be it a lifestyle gadget or Business service its is all about entry point and weighing up the benifits of using it or not. An earlier comment to this post said
" I can envisage a situation whereby we no longer offer social media to clients, but demand it from them, as a necessary part of their SEO." - @dan_arnold"
As a social media practitioner and media maker I welcome this new dawn of SEO and Social Media collaboration. You do what you do best and we do what we do best and there begins a beautifil friendship!
An entry point example for you. A colleague of mine was invited to run some computer classes for Age Concern in the UK. The day centre had 1 computer that never got used and the care worker wanted the centre visitors to make use of the resource, may be turn them in to 'silver surfers' (that phrase has never been the same since x-men!) The workshop leader asked one question, What song was played at your wedding? On getting a selection of responses he went to YouTube and low and behold the requests kept coming. After this you couldn't keep them off YouTube, they created play lists and thats where the story ends for me but you get the picture.
Many of the low entry point social networks I've initiated for clients have taken 9 - 15 months to establish. They have been extentions to customer service or lead generation strategies now that they boost SEO I know it will make my job a whole lot easier.
Find your local social media maker or prolifice digital networker and get them on retainer is my advise. The best Social Media is about worth, integrity and ethics. Not that SEO at its finest isn't but weather you are an SEO mathematician, scientic or alchemist its been about eye balls and not heartbeats.
This is an exciting time.
I work mostly with lawyers in the UK.... dinosaurs in almost every respect... I know we all have problems from time to time with client buy in but with lawyers... yelp !
This is really interesting. I forgot about the Social Connections page until I read this post. While perusing my connections, I noticed something that I haven't seen (or noticed) before, Secondary Connections.
"Secondary connections are "connections of your connections". You don't control secondary connections directly. The only way to remove them is to remove the connecting friend(s)."
You could conceivably mine that list and attempt to become connected with those accounts, exponentially. The hope would be that you increase the SERP exposure for any page you've shared or +1'd. It would probably be incredibly time-consuming to do, and spammy if you did it efficiently, but could be done nonetheless. The big question is if it's worth your time to do it or not. I'm sure like all things, every little bit helps.
I believe that Google will have to figure out a better way of presenting Social Results. Integrating them into the standard results (along with local stuff) is kind of misleading to searchers. I'm not always looking for something from a local company, or something my friends like. Usually I'm looking for the most relevent.
Google is on the right track, but just needs to organize the results better. (Unless Google's overall goal is to make us stop focusing on SEO, but rather on PPC)
Interesting post about Google and Bing's filtered results that just came out today.
https://searchenginewatch.com/article/2081047/DuckDuckGo-Ditch-Google-Bing-for-Unfiltered-Search
DuckDuckGo lets you escape Google's and Bing's filter bubble!
As this rolls out, it may alter your network growth plans. It also will provide improved awareness of what others in your network are doing - insightful connectedness. What will be interesting is the follow-on actions from that - who reacts to them and how does it change expectations?
Rand,
Is it important to have one single account across each social media area, or like in my case, have separate personal and business accounts at twitter, facebook, quora etc...
The number of followers for each account can vary a great deal, but I want to make sure my content is maximally shared.
Consistency seems to be the key, and I would hate to have a search engine not connect the dots properly if my accounts are too plentiful or not consistent. However, I do want to separate my personal accounts from my business name, yet share between them.
Hopefully you know where I am going with this. I just do not want to waste any time or effort.