How do you feel about social media, particularly as it relates to your brand?
Better put, how would you feel about social media marketing if you knew search engines took your company’s social activity into account when determining your search ranking?
Hallie Mummert of Target Marketing recently wrote an excellent piece titled Search: Get Real About Real Time SEO. The article, featuring quotes from TopRank Online Marketing® CEO Lee Odden, opens with an example of a real time search conducted in the light of recent riots in Oakland, CA:
“Searching Google for “Oakland riots” led to a page of blended search results—one could find news stories, videos, blog posts and tweets. That’s right, Twitter posts showed up in an automated scroll box about halfway down the Google search engine results page.”
Mummert goes on to state that query-based, real time search is not unique to Google as other major search engines, including Yahoo! and Bing, are also integrating social media content into search rankings.
“You have to wonder, if you’re making it into the real-time results,” Odden ponders, “does that add another layer of signal to the overall signal to tell Google, Bing and Yahoo! that your content is of high value to the marketplace?”
Odden helps tie real time and social media results into the larger sphere of a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) program by stating, “Search is already a moving target and real-time just escalates that. This makes it important for marketers to pay attention to the overall search landscape.”
Advice Odden provides to marketers in this article includes:
- Branching out beyond Web analytics reports to see how the search results pages are composed
- Noting what content topics and types tend to rank highly
- Searching for patterns in search results
- Leveraging patterns for either immediate opportunities or to shape long-term search strategies
Read the rest of this article by visiting Target Marketing online.
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