Social SEO - An Essential Part of SEO Strategy

  

Social Media SEO is one of the hottest trends in SEO. Companies that properly leverage social media are thought to have an advantage of those who do not, and a few often-touted success stories are usually enough to convince even the smallest mom-and-pop store to open up a Facebook page. The reality of social SEO is far more complex, and something that requires a great deal of effort to best use. Like every form of SEO, though, its proper use can lead to greater sales and a more robust online business presence.

What is Social SEO?

Figuring out social SEO is bit easier than some issues that you will find in the marketplace (figuring out what is CRO, for example, requires more of a background in SEO), but it is still more complex than some would have you believe. SEO social media is about more than just having a Facebook page or a Twitter account. It is certainly more than spamming unwitting followers with links to your webpage or hoping for a reciprocal retweet relationship with someone halfway around the world. Instead, social SEO can be best defined as leveraging real social interactions to create web traffic, in this case through the medium of a social networking website. The point is to try to drive SEO social mentions of one’s brand or product on the network, thus driving traffic to one’s website or brick and mortar business. As you might expect, there is a certain art to this — an art that, unfortunately, is roundly ignored by many who practice the process.
 

Strategies for Social SEO

Social SEO truly has to be social, something that many small businesses have found out over the last few years. While most customers are more than happy to engage in the SEO social media relationship with a company (72% of consumers trust an online review as much as a real person), small businesses are starting to flee the social marketplace (Facebook use is down three percent over one year). The sad truth behind the lagging numbers is that most small businesses had been convinced that social media was the “new” SEO, and they jumped into all the bad practices that SEO has had to abandon since the advent of Google Panda and Penguin. Businesses would follow any Twitter account that would be tangentially related to their own, hoping for a reciprocal relationship. They would also use Facebook pages as little more than spam, leading to followers abandoning a sinking ship.

It is wise, then, to create a SEO social media strategy that actually helps to drive customers to your existing website or place of business. Your job is to create synergy between the social site’s functionality and your other ventures – a monumental task. It might be helpful to look at an industry example to understand how a social strategy can benefit your business.

Lenny’s Subs is a sandwich chain that stretches across the Southeast and a good portion of the Midwest. Most of the locations are located in small strip malls, generally near other fast food restaurants. Lenny’s, however, tends to be especially busy on certain days of the week and it tends to owe that fact to its social strategy. Lenny’s has instituted a program called “Social Wednesdays”. Customers who “Like” the web page receive a free coupon every Wednesday. This coupon is usually fairly small (a one or two dollar discount), but it leads to long lines every day. The small loss taken on these coupons is overcome by the fact that most of these customers bring a friend or family member, and the coupons can only be used by one person per check. Lenny’s, then, is using social media to drive real world sales. The Facebook page is also intimately connected with Lenny’s corporate webpage, leading to a synergy between the two – customers can visit the Facebook page from the corporate website, while the coupons lead back to the corporate page.

The Lenny’s example highlights two important aspects of social SEO. First, it shows a reciprocal relationship between the company and the customer. The customers receive a discount in exchange for what is essentially free advertising – both parties are aware of the relationship, and both enter into it freely. This example also shows remarkable synergy between the social site, the corporate site and the brick and mortar location – all three locations are connected, and customers are encouraged to move from social relationships to information-seeking behaviors and finally into customer conversion.

Social SEO is just another part of doing business in the modern economy. If you can follow the example of a business like Lenny’s and encourage customers to become part of your marketing strategy, you will have succeeded on that front. From there, you will find yourself working on determining what is CRO – that is, learning how to move from social SEO to conversion based on your ability to attract, maintain and please your customers long enough to get them to buy into your products.