The Intersection of Search and Social Media

The Intersection of Search and Social Media

On a recent episode of Found Friday, I sat down with CallRail’s SEO Manager, Carolyn Lyden. Carolyn helps develop CallRail’s SEO program and works with her marketing, content, social, and community teams to discover the sweet spots for obtaining good SEO and useful content. She’s not only a rising start in search, she’s also putting smart marketing systems in practice to help grow her company.

Check out the tips we discussed during the show below to get a jump start on making the most of SEO, social, and other marketing efforts to attract your audience.

CallRail helps over 100,000 companies optimize their marketing and increase ROI with call tracking, recording, and analytics.

How do we connect SEO and social media in our organization?

The first step in finding the right balance of marketing elements, including SEO and social media, is collaboration. Regardless of department, each team in your company has the same goals in mind: to make your company more successful. Not all companies are set up to make sharing and collaboration simple, but with a little digging you can get there.

One of the best ways to start is to share your own data and an insight that might help another team. By showing your own collaborative spirit and giving them data that will make them shine you’re creating trust and starting the conversation. Since everyone is working toward the same front, look at how you can improve your company’s brand awareness, profit, revenue, etc. by working together to get the most usage out of your budget.

Routine monthly meetings are a great way to learn about what’s working in each department and what tools are available to achieve the best possible results. For example, your social, SEO, or email team may have recently started using a new listening too that makes it easier to understand topics that your audience is engaging with – every department can benefit from that data!

When it comes to defining what makes good social content, it can get tricky when trying to measure a content’s social impact. Since there’s a lot of visibility around social content, if someone doesn’t click on a social ad/post but searches for the content on Google, it can come up as organic traffic.

Did you know that more than 60% of Americans watch TV with another screen in their hands – whether it’s a cell phone, tablet, or laptop. That has taken measuring TV ad campaigns to a whole new level – as people see an ad and then turn to search to further explore.

Alternatively, if they happen to type in what they think the URL is, it can come up as direct traffic. Although these two instances can seem a little muddled, social is still a great driver of brand awareness – regardless of the numbers.

In all instances of search and social, audiences are telling you exactly what they care about, want, and need. This pinpoint is where the intersection between search and social lies. So, how do you get to it?

Think outside-the-box

Don’t just follow traditional marketing, be open to using social media in settings it doesn’t usually fit into – and avoid funneling everything into marketing.

That may mean more social aspects of selling and even account management. It may also mean that you don’t participate in some “big social platforms that everyone is on” because of the noise. Maybe you channel your efforts elsewhere if you don’t have big budgets.

Try to tailor your message to each platform based on your audience’s needs and wants.

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Use forums work as great SEO-builders

Managed by their social team, CallRail’s community forum serves as their own personalized social media channel for their specific products. Like Reddit, this community forum uses user-generated content from forum discussions to help beef up their SEO. (Note: make sure to use the consumers voice when inputting user-generated content for the best SEO results).

Tweeting still works

Use Twitter chats to build brand awareness by building a rapport with industry experts through tweets. Take parts of these social conversations and turn them into quotes for your content to amplify your SEO.

You can also take trending Twitter topics in your market / industry and create content around them, targeted at the topic keywords. They’re definitely likely to garner more attention and to have improved sharability and findability by your audience.

Don’t stop at just search and social – transform your marketing ecosystem

Pay attention to what people are talking about and searching for online and on social media. Turn these themes into target keywords and use them for email subject lines or email topics. This method also works well for ads and paid-content. You can find these types of keywords on forums, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

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Share your data

Always have social data readily available for your team. Set up a time to discuss what information is currently being mined and how that data can be used to support future content. This sharing of information comes in handy when determining what platforms are performing best and what tone of voice is most suited for your audience.

Embrace the long tail

Long Tail keywords can at times be hard to find, but they provide significant benefits for small businesses.  On Google My Business, consumers can go in and ask questions about a company like, “what are the hours of operation?” These questions clue in the business on what content they should publish for their consumers on their website.

Follow the rising rank trends

If you notice some of your content rising in SEO ranking, see what your competitors are talking about and what the social conversation is around that topic.

Do your competitors have similar content but on different channels or is there an opportunity for you there as well? Have you shared the content that’s rising in rank with your social channels? Did you use tags, hashtags, and other callouts that match the ranking keywords?

Know your Universal Search Elements

Google doesn’t tell us every single aspect of their algorithm. There are many outside factors, such as Twitter replies, that affect your site traffic. Since there are so many varying factors, don’t rule out social just because it doesn’t directly impact SEO. Social still allows topics to show up as a search result, which is perfect for linking and sharing the social content to drive SEO traffic.

Tying it all together

All aspects of your marketing efforts are part of an ecosystem and should be treated that way to make the most of them. If you’re living with the insights of your SEO, social, email, or paid efforts, then step one is to get access to the info you need.

Making SEO and social efforts great is a constant goal for the pros, and that comes from using methods that make your audience feel heard. Nothing does that better than tying together the types of channels they’re already on and giving them the content they’re looking for now.

Have more tips on tying together your search and social efforts? Let us know in the comments!