3 Ways Social Media Impacts SEO

Posted on May 9, 2013 by Jenny Stradling

You know that everything on the web is social. The phrase “let’s get social” appears on just about everyone’s website. But, until the last couple years or so, social media had very little, if any, impact on your search rankings. It still had value, no doubt, as companies able to garner huge followings were able to drive followers to their websites and increase brand awareness and sales, among other things.

But now, social has a lot to do with your search engine optimization strategy. We’ll show 3 concrete ways in which it does.

Examples of how Social Media directly impacts SEO

Personalized Results

If there’s one big trend on the web, it’s relevancy, and personalized search is always more relevant to the searcher. You see that icon with the circle around it? If you search in Google and see that icon, it means it’s a personal search result you’re more likely to see when signed in to Google.

When you sign in to Google, it examines people who are in your Google+ circles, and whenever you type in a search term, you’re more likely to see a result from someone in your circles than any other search result. For now, Google only does this for its own social network, but other social media websites are lobbying to be included.

This is also true for Bing. Because Bing is integrated with Facebook, when you are signed in to Facebook and you search Bing, guess what shows up? Social Results:

Follower Count/Social Shares

Google takes these two important metrics into account when deciding which content is more authoritative. Follower count isn’t emphasized nearly as much as the number of social shares (retweets, Facebook shares, LinkedIn shares etc…) because it can be easily manipulated, but both metrics play a role in determining your search engine rankings.

Think of it this way: say your content gets 100 social shares on average each time you promote it on a social network, but say your competitor’s only gets 5. All other factors being equal, who’s more likely the trustworthy source of information?

Searching Directly on Social Sites

Facebook recently introduced its new “Graph Search.” It’s slightly different from Google in that it searches your friends, places, interest, and photos to help you immediately find an answer to your question, rather than providing a link to a website. Practically speaking, you might use Graph Search to look for “Chinese restaurants.” Then, you can see which of your friends went to a Chinese restaurant near you.

Which are you more likely to trust: a highly rated restaurant that people you don’t know on Google say is popular, or a Chinese restaurant your best friend recommends, whose tastes you know you like?

And the interesting part is SEO has almost no place in this type of search.

Build Your Social Media Following!

The most important takeaway from all of this is that being active on social media is essential to your search visibility now, and in the future. At a basic level, develop a presence on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+ and Pinterest, and give away interesting content you think will benefit your target audience. It takes a ton of hard work to build and maintain your social media profiles, but it definitely helps increase your marketing ROI. If managing your social media accounts is too much for you, remember you can always contact Eminent SEO for help. We offer a full array of social media services from banner designs to fully managed solutions.

Jenny Stradling

CEO EminentSEO.com. SEO and SEM Strategist, social media girl, blogger, music lover, soul searcher. Collects: books, pictures, quotes, music, art, dreams...

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4 Steps To Building A Brand On A Budget

Posted on February 1, 2013 by Star Padilla

So you’re starting a business and you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed with everything? (If you say you aren’t, you’re a liar) . You don’t need to be a millionaire to build your brand- everyone has to start somewhere. Social Media is a free and great place to start – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Tumblr are all solid places to get a kickstart your first impression in a digital sense. Below you will find some ways I think you can start to build your brand on a budget and when you’re ready for a little assistance you can reach out to our Eminent team.

1. Customer Service is Key

Have you ever heard the saying, “First Impressions are everything”? Well those words couldn’t be any more true. Customer service is key when it comes to building your brand with your potential audience and/or demographic. Slip up and give some a sour taste right off the bat; people will treat you like the Bubonic Plague and steer clear.

Going above and beyond to make a customer feel appreciated, not only creates a solid foundation for a returning customers but develops brand affinity. Brand affinity builds word-of mouth, and in turn you’ve got a social buzz going. And so the domino effect continues.

2. Think Outside the Box and Get Creative

Dollar Shave Club is by far, one of my favorite companies who reflects the “Think Outside the Box” mentality and created a low budget video- that gained them more than 8+ Million views and one of the most viral campaigns for a start-up.

3. Make Friends & Collaborate

Whether you’re looking to work in a collaborative work environment like Co+Hoots or GangPlank or looking to collaborate two brands, like what Monster Cable and Dr. Dre did to create Beats by Dre to build awareness of both brands – Each side could bring a little something unique to the table. Each company has their own USP (Unique Selling Proposition) that they can leverage, and in these collaborative opportunities you give the opportunity to bring what makes you shine to the for-front and that too for your collaborative partner. Win-win all around.

4. Market Your Resources and Be Resourceful

Don’t take your team for granted and recognize the assets you have at hand. Each individual you have hired has a skill set that gravitated you to hire them and each of those individuals have interests beyond their day-to-day work load. Maybe you need video- and you can’t afford to hire a big production team to execute what you thought was going to be a pricey penny- why not keep it low-budget and entertain the thought of using your own team of real employees and ditch the idea of actors. Have you ever taken a peek at Google’s Videos, featuring one of our favorites, Matt Cutts. Now they are a HUGE company, but recognize they can cut costs and create just as great videos on a small budget.

So remember, you don’t need a huge budget to start to build a brand. Money helps to nurture and build support but if you’re just starting out, I hope these four initial steps will help in conjuring up those creative juices .

Star Padilla

You could say I'm a chatter box with an eye for design. I'm what you’d call a digital strategist. Helping companies and individuals focus on making their businesses money while managing their social media platforms, content and audit their overall design/brand.

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Why You Need Social Media For your Business

Posted on October 4, 2012 by Jenny Stradling

Social Media is imperative for businesses online. You need to be where your audience is. And where are they? On your website? Maybe. Maybe not. But you know they ARE on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Tumblr, Typepad, Posterous, LinkedIn, YouTube or some other social site.

Did you know that as of September 2012 Facebook has 955 million users, over 42 million pages and 9 million apps? YouTube has over 4 billion views per day. Google + now has over 250 million registered users! LinkedIn has 175 million. Twitter 140 million.

Whoa.

Here at Eminent SEO we understand the value in involving social media as part of a larger scaled on-line marketing plan. Although we specialize in SEO, we believe that SEO without social is… well, dead.

Social drives direct, targeted traffic to your site.
Social helps you directly engage with your clients.
Social increases your product and brand awareness.
Social allows you to share your day to day specials, events, office updates and fun, more candid aspects of your business.
Social encourages people to share your posts, content and links – making your outreaches more viral.
Social increases your search engine visibility, helping your website rank higher in the organic search engine results.

In a nutshell: Social rules.

For years every online marketer has muttered these 3 words at least once, “Content is king”.

Is it still? Yes, more than ever! And what better way to share that content then socially for millions to see? Content can be a number of different forms of digital media from text to animated videos. Some common sharable content ideas:

Articles
Press Releases
Blog Posts
Newsletters
Images
Memes
Videos
Infographics
Audio Clips
Custom Apps

A properly optimized social media platform is a perfect place to house your digital content and give Google and the other engines another way to get to your site. By integrating your SEO strategy into your social media optimization your platforms have the opportunity of ranking on their own for your target keyword strategy. Why give Google only one website to rank for your brand and keywords when you could give them 100’s?

Here at Eminent SEO we believe in customizing your marketing strategy to incorporate social where it most benefits your business. We do research before making suggestions so we can recommend developing social profiles on platforms your demographic is already using. We then design, optimize, manage, network and boost your branded profiles for increased awareness. Social requires daily management in order to be effective. If you don’t have the time to manage your social media, don’t worry, we do! If you want to do the bulk of your social networking, but need advice, we can do that too. If you are interested in learning more about our social media marketing services – then click this link to visit Eminent Social Media and how we can help take your social media marketing strategies to the next level… or you know, just call us: 800-871-4130

Jenny Stradling

CEO EminentSEO.com. SEO and SEM Strategist, social media girl, blogger, music lover, soul searcher. Collects: books, pictures, quotes, music, art, dreams...

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Easy, Affordable Videos for Companies of All Sizes

Posted on August 24, 2012 by Zachary Ankeny

A company’s audience – these days – is more apt to respond to visual stimuli than ever. We want eye-candy; we want it quickly and simply.

Because the majority of internet content is now a mix of both written content and appetizing images and video, companies are gearing their marketing strategies toward sating the visual thirst.

With a growing number of companies needing video services that can be created within their budget, many video-creation services are adjusting their packages to allow any company – big or small – to add stunning videos to their web properties.

At Eminent SEO, not only are we an SEO firm, a Phoenix web design agency, and developer, but we can also produce high-quality videos that showcase your brand/company and give you a new reach of clients. Whether your video budget is $100 or $100,000, we can produce videos that tantalize your client-base and leave them wanting to know more about you.

Contact us today to get started on your new video.

Here are some samples of our favorite corporate videos that have spread across the web, promoting the companies’ brand name to millions of viewers.

Dodge

Jack in the Box

Heineken

Zachary Ankeny

After attaining my Associates Degree in Visual communications in 2000, I set off on a long career as a freelance writer and graphic designer. I have designed and headed many marketing campaigns for companies big and small all around the country. It is my belief that graphic design and writing go hand-in-hand, as they are both forms of communication. My non-fiction works have been published in dozens of magazines and publications. I have written for – and worked with – organizations such as: Banner Hospitals, The Jerome Historical Society, The Arizona Historical Society, City of Tempe, City of Bakersfield, Town of Gilbert, Wildhorse Ranch Rescue, Cynic Magazine, e|Fiction Magazine, and many more. Writing and designing is my passion and I look forward to continuing on with it for many years to come.

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How Mobile Augmented Reality Will Change the Lives of Everyone on the Planet

Posted on August 15, 2012 by Zachary Ankeny

A new movie trailer came out yesterday for the Will Ferrell movie “The Campaign.” If you want to watch the trailer, all you have to do is pull a dollar bill out of your pocket, aim your ipad, iphone, or android phone at the currency – using the app “Blippar” – and the dollar bill comes to life. Will Ferrell replaces George Washington on the bill and the various words and engravings turn into fighter jets and eagles soaring and many other “American things.”

This impressive technology comes from Blippar, a tech company in the United Kingdom, which has been hinting all over the web at the newest things they intend to become “Blippable.” The company considers it’s technology “highly advanced,” and promises that it will take us into a futuristic new world.

“Blippar™ is a revolution for traditional print and marketing offering the power to turn every single piece of print or physical branding in the real world into an instantaneous digital, interactive experience,” Blippar proudly states.

Using image-recognition technology, Blippar is able to recognize quite quickly what is on your mobile device’s screen and then enhances the reality by making the environment interactive, allowing 3d images and videos to swirl around you.

After only a single hour of Blipping nearly everything I could find, I am as confident as Blippar staff is, that this technology will definitely change the world.

While there is not a wealth of information on the company or the product yet — the start-up is still in its infancy as they are perfecting the technology — there are many videos of what this app can do, and what they plan to do.

Watch a video of “what exactly Blippar is,” and how it works.

Watch a video of how Blippar turned Virgin Media Magazine completely interactive. Billionaire Richard Branson is excited to be using this technology and is devoted to pushing Blippar’s possibilities to its limits.

Amazing video ad for Nissan/The Dark Night Rises.

Visit Blippar’s Official Website for more details, images, and demos.

Zachary Ankeny

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Monetizing Pinterest

Posted on June 25, 2012 by Zachary Ankeny

Interesting topics were discussed over the weekend at the “AngelHack – Hackathon” in Palo Alto, CA. Part convention – part trade expo, AngelHack brings developers from all around the country into one arena, allowing developers to showcase their products and ideas, while hoping for seed capital from prospective investors.

While some of the ideas were hits, and some were misses, the future of one idea wasn’t up for debate. Francisco Guerrero, CEO of Pintics (an analytics tool built specifically to track trends and statistics related to the social media site “Pinterest”), unveiled Shopinterest.co – described as a “Shopify” for Pinterest.

Shopinterest will allow users to utilize their “boards” and “pins” as product thumbnails for a salable product. “Our Pinterest analytics service targets large e-commerce companies,” said Guerrero, “but after we saw the large volume of sales generated via Pinterest, we decided to help regular users join in the fun and profits.”While Guerrero was very excited about this project, he was also careful to not divulge all of the details of it. The public only has a snapshot of what Shopinterest will eventually be, at this point, but it promises to be ground-breaking.

However, it remains to be seen how users will react to the monetization of Pinterest. As the majority of social networking sites are making the move into the “profit” sector, these sites also must carefully balance the relationship between e-commerce and free entertainment; otherwise their viewers/users could easily turn on them and make the site obsolete. (cough) Myspace.

Shopinterest is expected to continue its initial development for the next few months and begin linking shopping carts to Pinterest within the year. While no one can foresee if this project will be a success or a failure, it IS an interesting concept and – if done right – could draw even more users to Pinterest.com

Zachary Ankeny

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Direct Response Consulting – A view from an Oldtimer

Posted on February 17, 2012 by Jim Peake

Direct Response Consulting

When I first broke into the direct mail printing business as a printing broker I worked with many paper dragons like Readers Digest, Dreyfus Service Corporation, The Danbury Mint, Consumers Union (Consumers Report) and American Express just to name a few. This was when direct mail better known as “junk mail” and direct mail was king back in the early 1980’s. This was back in the Chicago heyday where there had to be 2-3 dozen big strong direct mail printers who used web presses rug at 2,200 feet per minute on a fast sheeter. Most of these companies were billing from $15 Million to $75 Million per year each.

We literally printed train loads of paper and converted the paper into “junk mail.” The reason why it was called “junk mail” was because 98% of it was thrown out. Hello landfills! It only took 2% of the mailed pieces to convert into orders to make a business go into the black. The interesting thing today is we have very similar parallels with the internet. If we can get 2% of people to respond to our website with a phone call or an e-mail or a 2% click through on a banner advertisement we usually have something. However the difference is the other 98% is not called “junk.” In
online the other 98% just doesn’t work!

In order to make the 2% conversion number go higher in the old direct mail days we changed a “black plate” on the press which usually was something like a simple copy change or a pricing change. We had to stop the press from going 2,200 feet per minute and make the change. This cost money and time, however it saved a ton of money if we could optimize the right price with the right offer. Many times we would change 200 plus plates on a single creative package and get them into the mail and wait for the responses. If the responses pulled well over 2% we had want we called a “rollout” and would print millions of pieces and drop them in the BRC’s (bulk mail centers) around the USA.

So here we (direct response consultants) are some 30+ years later, nothing and everything has changed! Black plate changes are a thing of the past. Today we change codes on web pages and 800#’s and run multiple landing pages at the drop of a hat. We can do this for minimal costs as well as in a few hours in some cases. A good example might be today where I have a client who has been successfully running Google Adwords and wants to test other search engines.

We are going to run some PPC traffic at Yahoo and Bing as well as start up a new Facebook PPC campaign. The Facebook campaign is more effort than redirecting the same Adwords traffic from Bing and Yahoo to the same website as Google sends traffic to. Since Facebook is a propriety walled garden platform we have to create a special landing page or “fan page” designed to convert the traffic. This effort does cost money and time and it would need to be run so that enough impressions are accumulated to make some smart decisions if this is the place to advertise, ideally 500,000 to 1 million impressions is a good sampling of Facebook traffic. Time will tell. I will alos tell you that direct mail still works just as well today as it did 30 years ago, however we now have the direct response know how to test online first before we us the more expensive direct mail services.

Here is a secret about Facebook, Facebook is probably the single greatest Direct Response Platform ever invented. The point to all of this long winded article is to test and track the people and how they use the Facebook Fan Page, (or any other media) this is direct response consulting whether it be in direct mail or in Facebook. If they, the users, take action (CPA) and give us the desired and measured results it is an area we will continue to re-invest in.

If you have any questions please call Jim Peake @ 781-990-8844. Thank you.

Jim Peake

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The New Kid on the block : Google+

Posted on August 11, 2011 by Star Padilla

You could say, Google+ is the ‘new’ hot social network to hit the web. I mean as of June 28, about 25million people have visited Google+. Here’s the breakdown by country, according to comScore:

6.44 million from the U.S.
3.62 million from India
Roughly 1 million from both Canada and the UK
920,000 from Germany
More than 780,000 from Brazil
About 500,000 from both France and Taiwan

What the heck is Google+: Have you been living under a rock? You could say, Google+ is the hot social network on the block or web for that matter . I mean as of June 28, about 25 million people have visited Google+. Now that’s what you call the ‘popular kid’.

Google+ isn’t and won’t be the easiest social network to understand if you have (or maybe haven’t) tried it out. It has a lot of features that even your advance users may overlook. It’s definitely the social network that’s making an attempt to rival Facebook.

The social network is made up of a plethora of social products that include: Stream (a newsfeed), Sparks (a recommendation engine), Hangouts (a video chat service), Huddle (a group texting service), Circles (a friend management outlet), and Photos.

This isn’t the first attempt for Google to dominate the social realm. Do you remember their two flops, Google Wave and Google Buzz? Kinda makes you wonder, if Google+ will stay afloat?

Currently Google+ isn’t fully open to the public, and currently invite only. So if you have a friend who’s riding the social wave, and been jumped into the Google+ gang, your best bet is to kiss their tush and ask for a ‘pass’ aka an invite to hang with the cool kids. It’s was rumored that July 31, Google+ was going to fully open their doors, but that obviously didn’t happen.

The new invite feature they have recently rolled/rolling out allows you to “invite friends” via a button on your Google+ account and you’re provided with a link to send your friends. Alleviates the guessing game, if you don’t know their email addresses and you can directly invite them via Twitter direct message, Facebook message, etc. Keep in mind, that Google+ is still in their ‘limited field trial’, so there is a limit of 150 people that can sign up to Google+ using your link. Link to Google+ YouTube announcement.

So What’s New with Google+: Rather than making another company blog, Google+ created a help section called What’s new in Google+ , which offers feature updates to keep you in the loop. Be sure to check it out, and add me to your circle! @StarPadilla

Star Padilla

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