social-seo content strategy: ideas for a data driven approach

Social-SEO Content Strategy:

Ideas for a Data Driven Approach

COPYRIGHT 2013 CATALYST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. APRIL 12, 2023

Why Does Social Media Matter in SEO?

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There is a correlation with social shares and rank• Moz 2013 Study:– Page Authority has the highest correlation

with rank followed by Google +1s, # of LRDs, and then # of Facebook shares.

• Searchmetrics 2013 Study:– Google +1s have the highest correlation with

rank, followed by Facebook Shares, then # of backlinks.

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Searchmetrics Correlation Study

Length of URL% Backlinks with Stopword

Θ SEO-Visibility of backlinking URL% of rel=nofollow backlinks

TweetsPinterest

Facebook LikesFacebook Comments

Facebook "Total"Number of Backlinks

Facebook SharesGoogle +1

0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5

0.160.18

0.20.25

0.280.29

0.310.330.340.340.34

0.4

Mean Spearman Correlation

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Source: Searchmetrics, SEO Ranking Factors – Rank Correlation 2013


Google Doesn’t Use Social Signals as Part of Its Ranking AlgorithmCorrelation ≠ Causation

“If you make compelling content, people will link to it, like it, share it on Facebook, +1 it, etc. But that doesn't mean that Google is using those signals in our ranking.”

–Matt Cutts

In other words…Content that performs well on social media is the same kind of content that performs well in search.

– SHARABLE content does well: This is content that gets shared on social media and accumulates backlinks.

– Social sharing AMPLIFIES content: social shares improves content visibility, getting in front of more eyes.

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How Social Shares Affect Links

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Correlation 2

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Social Shares to Linking Root Domains

AnonymousClientData

NiceCorrelatio

n

Correlation:0.900850699


Keyword Usage & Rank: Low CorrelationsMoz 2013

Keyword Usage in H1

Keyword Usage in Body Text

Body Text Similarity to Keyword

Keyword Usage in Title Tag

0 0.1

0.12

0.12

0.13

0.13

Searchmetrics 2013

Keyword in Domain Name

Keywords in Body

Keywords in External Links

Position of KW in Title

0 0.1 0.2

0.03

0.11

0.11

0.12

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Create Sharable Content!• Keywords have been devalued

– Create content that is optimized for search and social, but mostly social.

• Shareable content is more important– Content spreads more easily with the advent

of social networks and shareable content (with the help of social media) will get you more links

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Why People Share?

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Upworthy has a Pretty Awesome

Process

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Source: Slideshare & Upworthy

Page Authority: 66

46 LRDs from Authoritative Websites

• Content = Embedded YouTube Video

• A few words of on-page text and a headline

• Ranks Page 1 for “monkey experiment” and “fairness experiment”• Text not found on

page or in anchor text

http://www.slideshare.net/Upworthy/how-to-make-that-one-thing-go-viral-just-kidding

http://www.upworthy.com/2-monkeys-were-paid-unequally-see-what-happens-next-sc4-3a


Things We Can Do Similarly• Test headlines on social

– Upworthy creates 25 headlines and does a lot of testing

– Treat SEO as an iterative process

• Test headlines on AdWords to see how search differs

• A/B test sharing button and other page aspects• Differ title, h1, open graph titles, twitter cards,

schema• Do research and optimize content for our

audience

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Influencer Marketing for SEO• Distribute your content, better. Get it

shared more.

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Image via David Armano

http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/2006/08/levels_of_influ.html

http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/2006/08/levels_of_influ.html


Create content that influencers like• Use a platform like Appinions to cater

content creation to industry influencers to make it more sharable

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Get Shared By Being First• Blab: Predict content trends and needs

72-hours in advance

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Introducing…Google Hummingbird

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What is Hummingbird?“With more complex queries, the algorithm can better understand concepts vs. words as well as relationships between concepts.”

-Amit Singhal

• An infrastructure change to the Google search engine, allowing for different inputs and new algorithms to be developed.

• Part of the infrastructure is a better understanding of speech through NLP, utilizing the co-occurence of synonyms and semantic relationships.

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Why Hummingbird Matters• Hummingbird opens Google to new

algorithms, utilizing new inputs– Social Media Inputs

• Hummingbird and mobile phone usage will change how people search– Moving to a more speech-like query– As peoples’ search behavior changes, we will

have less of an idea about how they search with keywords because of not provided

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Searches Are Always New Anyway• We Should Produce More Content to

Accommodate New-to-Google Searches– 15 percent of all queries are entirely new in

terms of either syntax, typographic variation, or emerging topic, and they had never been entered into a Google search before(2013, Think With Google)

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How to come up with content ideas from social media (not provided) while

capitalizing on its natural language (hummingbird)

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Introducing Tellagence: a tool that extracts keyword data from Twitter

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Some Keywords Tellagence Came-Up With:Keyword Occurrencesmiss 1148fat 569cold 297captain 297talking 286phone 265winter 452service 153

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Fast and easy content & keyword insights beyond what is accessible with standard keyword research tools


• “miss” – People missing friends they made on their cruise– Content: How to stay in touch with cruise friends so you don’t miss

them as much.

• “fat” – people concerned with weight gain on cruises– Content: How to not gain weight and enjoy yourself on a cruise.

• “captain” – people discussing who the captain is on their cruise ship.– Content: Do you have bio pages for your cruise captains? You

should.

• “talking” – people actively discussing (“talking”) with loves ones and friends about potentially taking a cruise.– Content: Create content to help aid this part of the sales cycle.

• “phone” & “service” – people saying they will be out of touch, away from phone because they won’t have service– Content: Is it true that you won’t have service? Convince people to

use phone on board.

• “cold” & “winter” – people want to go on Caribbean cruises when it becomes cold in the winter locally– Content: Winter or cold weather cruises and cruise deals.

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Mining Quora• Subscribe with RSS feeds (or use Gdoc):

http://www.quora.com/Cruises/rss

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http://www.quora.com/Cruises/rss


Social Language = Natural Language• The keywords and language extracted by

social tools is very natural and very conversational.– Remember our friend Mr. Hummingbird?

Social language should theoretically help us optimize for him, because it is written conversationally.

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Summary• Create sharable content; It gets more

backlinks and is more important than keyword optimization

• Amplify sharing with influencer marketing

• We can use social media to mine natural language information to optimize content for Hummingbird

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Thank You!Paul Shapiro

@fighto

http://blog.paulnshapiro.com/

https://twitter.com/fighto

https://twitter.com/fighto

social-seo content strategy: ideas for a data driven approach

Marketing

page text

social shares

page aspects

sharable content

socialseo content strategy

shareable content

content visibility

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