IS SOCIAL MEDIA REALLY KILLING MY BELOVED

SEO?

Is Social Media replacing the need for traditional SEO?

Are Social Signals now a ranking factor?

How can Google trust social accounts and stats?

What is social good for?

Are companies investing too much in social?

If Social isn’t killing SEO – what is?

Is SEO being killed?

Breakdown

SOCIAL MEDIA

Google’s definition of social media

What is Social Media

Google’s definition of social networking

Is this it?

What is Social Media

Businesses are not engaging properly with their brand or product.

Looking Closer Are we using social platforms more to get information

from our connections?

Does having personalised search give us a better experience?

Are less generic searches happening?

Is social media killing Google?

Is Hummingbird a way that Google is trying to become your friend?

IS SOCIAL REPLACING SEO

How can you replace SEO Traditional SEO forms the core of an online marketing

campaign

Search Marketing covers a wide set of disciplines

Still extremely important to have good site structure

Link profile needs to be clean and good quality

Social is small part of SEO campaignBut a LARGE part of marketing campaign

Social and Ranking Social Media companies like to sell their services by

saying it is a ranking factor

It isn’t …

Hot off the Press from Matt Cutts at PubCon

Google’s definition of social media

What is Social Media

Google’s definition of social networking

2011 Google SERP’s for “coffee”

2013 Google SERP’s for “coffee”

Zippy.co.uk/1

Is there any correlation?

Signal StrengthThe Scale of Google’s problem

Twitter # followers# tweets to a webpage# different webpages / news items being tweetedDo they culminate it all for the brand?

Need to gauge the authority of each person who RT’s or shares something

Cope with url shorteners

All in real time!

Signal StrengthThe Scale of Google’s problem

Facebook# likes to a post# comments on a post# shares of a post

Can they link the authority of a FB page as a brand signal?

Do they count the # likes a web page gets

Then do they need to gauge the power of who liked what and their influence?

Signal StrengthThe Scale of Google’s problem

Google +

Much easier for Google!

How can Google Trust You? Faking social profiles is the easiest thing to do, and to

Google it’s the next form of SPAM

What is a REAL user?

How can Google tell you are a REAL user?

Can humans identify fake profiles?

Does the amount of friends / followers you have mean you should be more influential?

I DID A LITTLE TEST

@PMiDebs - Before

@PMiDebs – After

HiveLink

Fake Followers & Likes

Starbucks

Are these all real users, or just numbers?

WHAT IS SOCIAL GOOD FOR

Ways Social works As part of your SEO strategy

Great for brand protection – taking up space in the SERPS

Cure for reputation management

INVESTING IN SOCIAL

Social Strategy Time and effort pushed into Social – having someone in

the office tweeting all day and sharing funny cat pictures .. How much does that increase revenue by?

Does it cover your social media person’s salary?

Does it directly increase your conversions – does it add value to your business

Can you honestly say that you increased your Facebook like and your rankings increased?

What should it entail Don’t have social accounts if you can’t run them well

Only have it as part of your SEO strategy

If you publish news, share the news, carefully follow people who would be interesting in your products

All about the interactions

Social profiles used for customer services – make sure you maintain your reputation

Keep your social media personnel under control

BUT LET’S ROLL BACK

IS MY BELOVED SEO BEING KILLED?

Google started directly targeting

Thin & duplicate content High ad to content ratio Content farms Over optimised link profiles Poor quality, unnatural links

Affiliates were hit the hardest, whether that had a good social account or not

February 23rd 2011

THIS YEAR SO FAR

Been a year of clean ups, reinclusions, recoveries and rebuilds

A year of unnatural link warnings, WMT’s messages, manual penalties and disavow files

Huge amount of sites still penalised and struggling

More and more needing full clean up and strip back

My beloved SEO is tougher than ever

2013

Ongoing Google updates Penguin releases May & Oct 2013

Clean up, cut deep, rebuild

Social Media doesn’t protect you against this

Many have seen this

SHALL WE JUST SAY SEO IS EVOLVING (AGAIN)

THANKS FOR LISTENINGwww.bronco.co.uk

@bronco + @davenaylor