As Google shifts its focus to quality and relevancy, content marketing adoption has soared. It is no coincidence that the increasing focus on content marketing closely follows the significant Google algorithmic changes aiming to give users a better search experience.

Google Trends chart for the key phrase [Content Marketing] — interest has taken off since February 2011, when the Panda update was rolled out.

In a previous post, I discussed how search and social are becoming more and more closely aligned.  If you listen to industry leaders on this topic, you will hear statements like “social is the new search,” “search and social are one,” and “you cannot manage search and social in silos.” Content marketing is indeed the glue that binds the search and social media relationship.

Content & The Search & Social Relationship

The search and social graphs have made giant strides in the recent past, and parallels can be drawn between these developments. Marketers are now faced with a complex and large search and social ecosystem that offers a world of opportunity for content-driven SEO marketers.

The relationship between social and search has changed, and several forces are behind this transformation. Content is now consumed and distributed locally and globally, across multiple devices (PC, mobile, tablet) and in multiple formats (text, video, images, etc.). It has become easier than ever for nearly anyone to create, share and consume content, leading to an overwhelming abundance of content on the Web.

As a result, social engagement is becoming increasingly dependent on high quality content, and search engines have begun to take social signals into account as a quality indicator, simply as a means of wading through the massive amounts of content out there. It is essential that marketers dig deeper into search, social, local and mobile data to understand how they all work in tandem to impact rankings.

The Changing SERP & Content

Since August, Google has been serving (for some keywords) SERPs with 7 organic listings, instead of the usual 10 listings. In many cases, these organic listings have been supplanted by things like image results and local results with maps, etc. In 2013, as Google rewards quality and relevancy, there are many opportunities to rank across multiple search types and in multiple formats to dominate the new Google SERP results across image, video, places, news and social media results.

If you look further into the way the SERPs have changed recently, video, social, mobile and local rankings all require good creative and different types of content to fuel them. Technical SEO is important, but will only get you so far — your SEO efforts need the catalyst that is content marketing. 

Content & SEO – A Synergetic Relationship

Content marketing provides search and social media marketers with a new opportunity to impact SEO, improve search rankings, and increase revenue generated through organic search. Focusing on social media activity to uncover SEO opportunities, and then offering actionable recommendations to increase visibility on search engines, is becoming a key priority for search marketers.

Content related to social engagement is the type of content that marketers are prioritizing in 2013. Seventy-eight percent (78%) of the marketers surveyed in the BrightEdge Search Marketers Survey stated that they would be focusing more on this in 2013.

Using Content To Drive Your Online Marketing Efforts

Below is a framework to ensure that content is driving your search and social efforts. This process builds upon search and social content synergies — not only does content drive your search and social activities, but your search and social research helps inform you to build your content plan.

The User

Understanding the user is paramount to leveraging content as your search and social catalyst. Optimizing for your target audience and for consumers is just as important as optimizing your keywords — a fact sometimes overlooked by search marketers.

Keywords – You & The Competition

Once you understand the users you are targeting, you can begin to look at a combination of keywords and social trends. Look at your baseline rankings and compare them against those of your competitors in the SERPs. What does their content look like? What content strategies are working for them? Use this to start brainstorming your own content, around which your search and social strategies will be built.

Social Trends & Topics

The relationship between search and social referrals is growing — understanding the correlation between social sharing and search rankings is essential as marketers use content marketing insights to further integrate social media and SEO strategies.

Monitor social media for topics relevant to your search keywords. Analyze the content being shared to reinforce what’s working while phasing out what isn’t.

Taking the correlation between search and social into account has proven to work. TinyPrints saw a 47% increase in rankings by integrating its organic search and Twitter strategies based on a clear understanding of this correlation.

Content Creation

Of course, the content you create has to be unique, insightful and relevant — Google set up Author Rank to encourage content creators and bloggers to publish precisely such content, as (presumably) nobody wants spammy or low-quality content attached to their name.

But when it comes to content, SEO marketers face challenges not just in terms of quality, but also methodology and management — especially in cases where the content and SEO teams have not historically worked close together.

Integrating your content creation process and your SEO process promotes learning across content and the SEO teams. It also provides scale and efficiency — users can create and optimize in sync without having to switch from SEO tools to CMS systems. The result is great content that is SEO friendly and allows you to maximize results from search (rankings, traffic, conversions, and revenue).

Travelocity made SEO an integral part of the content authoring process through Adobe Experience Manager with outstanding results. BrightEdge research revealed that for large sites, eliminating just two of the types of SEO errors found in the Travelocity study was associated with a 10% traffic increase and a five position hike in organic search rank.

Content Formats & Distribution

Producing quality content that aligns with your larger keyword strategy involves creating and repurposing content in multiple formats that ultimately fuel your SERP position strategy. Before I list a few types of content assets for distribution, it is important to remember the SEO basics such as:

• Optimizing title tags for each piece of your content
• Ensuring your copy is keyword focused but not “over” optimized
• Ensuring you optimize any inbound links from related content

You can then look at producing and distributing content across multiple channels and formats for search and social success based on a “build and share” methodology.

• Optimized webpages full of rich and unique content
• Guest posts
• Syndication projects
• Integrated SEO and PR projects
• Presentations
• Research projects
• Market insights
• Quality white-papers
• Case studies
• Client video testimonials

Conclusion

Taking a planned, detailed, and holistic approach to content across all digital media channels is very important to SEO success in 2013. Producing, managing, and sharing content is going to be a key priority for search marketers.

The wins from content marketing are long term compared to traditional SEO short-term, quick win tactics. The more unique and insightful content you produce, the more likely you are to rank/position in the long term.

Content is the catalyst that drives search and social media activity.

Today, I would like to focus on how you can utilize SEO and social sharing best practices to both optimize your Facebook page and foster engagement.

The Graph Search Differentiator

Facebook Graph Search is based on a social graph, which means that a user’s search results are personalized based on his or her connections.

Compared to searching on Google or Bing and being presented with results from all across the Web based on keyword matches, Facebook Graph Search presents you with results from content shared only on Facebook. This is from a database of over one billion people, more than 240 billion photos and over a trillion social connections.

The content is limited due to on privacy settings, and the output is based around pages, apps, groups, photos and places.

While optimizing for Facebook Graph Search is not the same as optimizing a webpage for search, there are several techniques you can use to optimize your Facebook page based on SEO best practices. Once optimized for search, you can then focus on how to optimize for social engagement on these pages. It is a great example of the importance of social signals and the convergence of search and social media best practice.

Big Data & The Personal Social Graph

I have talked about the importance of big data in search and social and how utilizing the huge amount of content and social media data has fostered rapid innovation in the social graph space. Adding social layers to big data has allowed Facebook to take advantage of the some of the 3.3 billion pieces of content being shared on Facebook each month.

Facebook Graph Search is personal big data. It’s a search engine based on your network data (connections, likes, interests, etc.). Graph Search blends local, social and content data for individuals and (eventually) for businesses. In order for marketers to maximize opportunity from the Facebook Social Graph, there are a number of search and social based strategies and tactics that can be deployed.

Optimization For Facebook Graph Search

In the visual below, I have highlighted (from left to right) how marketers can leverage key search optimization techniques and social sharing best practices. The process below starts with optimizing your Facebook page and ends with how you engage and share content.

Page, URL & Title

Just as on-page optimization is vital to SEO, Facebook page optimization is the first place to start on your Graph Search strategy. Ensure that you have selected the appropriate category, and plan for your basic information (such as the short description and the elements on your About page) to contain descriptive keywords, just like search. Make sure your page is relevant, always up to date, and publicly viewable and sharable.

• Ensure your Page name and URL are direct, but natural and relevant to your brand/business
• Ensure users can find you by adding a link to your Facebook page from your website
• Invite friends to your page

Local

Facebook Graph Search is a great tool for local and small businesses, and it is now more important than ever for these businesses to be active on Facebook. Users searching for a particular product or service can now easily find those recommended by their friends. In order for businesses to take advantage of Facebook Graph Search, a local listing and a local following are essential.

Danny Sullivan explains this in more detail while discussing Facebook Graph Search’s “multi-dimensional searches”:

Another difference is the layers of searching or refinement that Facebook Search offers compared to Google. For example, a Google search can show you restaurants in San Francisco, a pretty much single dimensional view. A Facebook search can show you restaurants in San Francisco liked by your friends. Or further, those liked by your friends who actually live in San Francisco, as opposed to those who live elsewhere. Or those liked by your single friends, your straight friends, your gay friends, your friends who work for a particular company….

To prepare your Facebook Page for local optimization within Graph Search, consider the following:

• If you have a location or a local place page, it is vital that you update your address now to make sure you can appear as a result when someone is searching for a specific location
• If you are in a niche sector such as hotels, restaurants, recruitment, travel and tickets, then you should be embracing Facebook Graph Search now

Content, Images, Video & Sharing

The sharing of content (posts, images, video, etc.) is the key to appearing within Facebook Graph Search results. The best way to attract and engage your audience is by regularly posting quality, relevant content.

• Ensure your content is related to your business
• Use high-resolution images when you share
• Encourage people to interact with your content when appropriate: post updates that elicit Likes or Comments, ask users to share or tag photos, etc.
• Build creative, unique content that allows people to connect with your brand

Engagement

When we talk about the importance of social signals, Likes and Check-ins can be viewed as important ranking signals for Facebook Graph Search. It is important to get creative with engagement- and interaction-focused strategies, such as competitions and quizzes with your fans. Attracting the right and relevant type of fans and groups allows you to send out a far stronger ranking signal.

Facebook shares more insight on fan acquisition and Page publishing best practices here.

Edgerank

Facebook’s proprietary algorithm, EdgeRank, determines how, when and if a post appears in a user’s News Feed. In general, the more a user interacts with a Facebook Page (liking, sharing, posting, commenting, clicking links, etc.), the more that Page’s content will appear within their News Feed over time. This means it’s not enough to simply get fans to “Like” your page. If you fail to engage those fans, your content may not appear in their feed at all!

Marketers need to understand EdgeRank well to create and post content that reaches the maximum number of viewers. They should ensure that interactivity and user engagement are top of mind when crafting a Facebook Page content strategy.

(For more information on EdgeRank, check out this useful infographic from PostRocket.)

Conclusion

Optimizing for Facebook Graph Search is not an exact science as the product (and the social graph itself) is continuing to evolve. What is certain, however, is that Facebook has huge amounts of data at its disposal and the platform has some of the strongest social signals on the Web. Businesses can and should take advantage of how Facebook presents structured data by optimizing for Graph Search today.

Search engines are increasingly using social media activity such as Likes, Tweets, Shares, and +1s to determine which pages are most relevant for keyword searches and to provide a personalized search experience. Meanwhile, social networks are rapidly developing their search capabilities to surface real-time information and interest demographics.

Social media has changed the way we work, and marketers are realizing that its importance and influence need to be correlated with ROI. Two of the biggest changes I have witnessed over recent years are:

1. Social media development and innovation has caused marketers look for new ways to measure and optimize search and social media campaigns, and
2. Search and social media growth has led to a convergence of campaign messaging across the two channels and an interplay of metrics.

In my last article, I talked about the intrinsic nature of the relationship between search and social, the convergence of content marketing, and the growth of mobile search.

Today, I would like to highlight key social media metrics that not only form the foundation of any search campaign, but also help you to attribute comparable value to your social campaigns.

After all, positive actions and behavior that encourages sharing of content across search and social channels should lead to a positive outcome — such as increased ROI.

As Channels Merge, Metrics Merge

As illustrated in the diagram below, online marketers inhabit a fragmented and complex social media ecosystem with a number of tools, platforms, and networks that fill the landscape between the marketer and the consumer.

Image used with permission: LUMA Partners

It is essential that while you navigate this landscape, you keep your focus on primary metrics that drive ROI. However, choosing the right metrics to measure and understanding the impact between social, search and other media channels can be difficult — with so many social media platforms, each with their own analytics, optimization and management needs, it’s easy to feel distracted or overwhelmed.

Social Media Metrics That Influence ROI

In social, just like with search, there are ways to estimate the potential ROI of a campaign. In this section, we will touch upon examples of data points from different social networks that illustrate how you can ultimately understand and better estimate your potential ROI from social.

1. Size & Reach

When you build a search campaign, the first thing you do is calculate the size and reach of your campaign. Social is no different, and the most obvious place to start is by calculating and aggregating the number of followers on Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and Google+, plus the number of subscribers to email and Blog RSS feeds.

On both Twitter and Facebook, for example, you can measure the number of followers and friends, updates, update recency, and follower/following ratio. But, rather than have these as standalone social metrics, you can think of them as comparable reach metrics for search ads.

If the number of keywords you can think of and authentically target is a measure of reach on search engines, then similarly, every follower or Like you earn effectively expands the reach of your social campaigns. The equation is simple — the more Likes and followers you have, the more users you can target ads to within social networks.

Social influence scores like Klout or social analytics services like Topsy can then help you get an idea of who the best users are to work with to expand your network of likers and followers.

Whatever you measure on any of these platforms, the priority here is to determine how you can measure social media’s impact on the metrics that are already in place to monitor the value drivers in your business. How does your social reach stack up against the reach of your search campaign?

To compare, use metrics you are already familiar with such as reach, activation or conversion, brand influencers, purchase, rank, conversion and ROI. By working with the language your company, or your client, is already familiar with and using internally, you can help bring them into the discussion of measuring ROI rather than confusing them with too many different data points.

2. Amplification & Engagement

Google has raised the bar in ensuring that only relevant, quality content that users read is recognized in SERPS. For social media marketers, it is more important than ever to understand what content will resonate with your audience, and measuring engagement as a result of content allows you to identify “gold” content.

This content can then be optimized so that search, social and content strategies can be built around it. Remember, social sharing and content are tied together very closely.

Develop a system to keep track of your content, such as:

1. Creating tags to measure your content and amplification based on social media channels such as Tweets, Likes, +1’s and RT’s.
2. Measuring and tracking cross-channel social media metrics – Tweet to your Facebook page and so forth so you can determine what type of content/message works on each different channel and build strategies accordingly.
3. Analyze traffic and site behavior of visitors to shared pages.
4. Capture engagement metrics relative to traffic, such as interactions per referred visit.

For example, on YouTube, while the total number of channel subscribers gives an idea of the overall popularity of the content, the per-video analytics often contain more valuable data for determining genuine engagement. The number of people that watched the video can be segmented by region and demographics. You can also find out how users discovered your content — such as via Google search or YouTube search — and see whether you have similar or different types of keyword queries in the two search engines.

If you are running ads on YouTube, it is worth measuring where users drop out of watching your videos; the more full plays your ads get, the higher the total play count is on your channel, which will have a positive impact on the ranking of any subsequent content you upload.

Likewise, on your blog, the total number of RSS and email subscribers gives you an idea of potential reach, but the number that actually read a particular blog post related to a promotion is a more accurate measure of impact. A useful exercise is to look at the wording of headlines in your most successful posts – do your readers respond more to offers, guides or news content?

3. Sentiment & Trends

Measuring sentiment is what many regard as a “soft” social media metric.

There are a hundreds of tools and services that do this, but the quality of analysis varies from service to service. Measuring brand sentiment and trust is not an exact science, but there are some things you can do to help quantify it.

Define and track negative, positive or neutral keyword phrases in social media posts. You can start by building out keyword lists to track what you perceive to be “positive” and “negative” keywords related to your brand.

Positive brand sentiment is normally indicated when website conversion rates increase with or without an increase in website traffic. Negative sentiment can be shown when a negative trend between traffic and conversion rates is identified. Also, if traffic remains consistent from social media and referral sources, but conversion rates continue to drop, this may show negative sentiment

Sentiment analysis is an important part of trend analysis, which means you are looking for signs of escalation as you prepare to take action, if needed. Track all positive and negative comments and spot trends to work out whether you should create ads or content addressing those particular trends.

4. Conversion & Economic Value

Although it is easier to measure the impact of a stand-alone social media project, such as a simple Tweet campaign measured against simple metrics, the best way to measure economic value is by looking at how your campaigns influence one another.

Measuring social media value based on its impact on other channels, such as search, is more complex — but a holistic view of the interplay between all the data points is increasingly achievable.

Not all social media activity may drive ROI directly, but can nonetheless drive an overall return on your investment in digital.

For example, key business functions such as R&D, client service and technical support derive value from social media by listening, while specific social activities are easily tied directly to earning KPIs. If investment and financial gain are relevant KPIs, this can turn into ROI.

Therefore, social media’s value is determined by its ability to influence specific outcomes. This could be the acquisition of a new customer, a new sale, recommendations and referrals. It could also be shown as a shift in sentiment between products and innovations, a boost in customer feedback and satisfaction or positive PR.

Measuring the impact of social media becomes less complex if you think of it as it as activity-specific. Measuring the value of social media depends on two things:

• Are you using social media to pursue a specific business objective associated with that channel? (e.g., more plays on YouTube, more followers on Twitter)
• Are you using social media to drive value and ROI via other channels?

For example, Leading digital marketing agency, Performics, and Feeding America combined information on Tweet volumes for specific topics with search engine rankings and web analytics data to determine what to Tweet about. They then matched their findings with their own most relevant website content to reference in new outbound Tweets to tap into the zeitgeist of sharing. By consistently Tweeting about trending topics where they already had great content, Feeding America achieved great results.

Conclusion

The increased importance of social signals means it is now essential to look at how, when, and why these signals influence rankings and position. Creating a Google+ page, adding social plugins, interlinking deep pages with social media properties and optimizing your social pages are all vital steps in tapping into the social Web while priming your brand for visibility in the social knowledge graph.

Measuring SEO KPIs such as links, rankings and search traffic in conjunction with social KPIs such as Likes, fans, friends, followers, network size and growth rate can give marketers a more holistic view of campaign success and ROI progress.

Since Google + was launched in June 2011, there have been a number of articles, opinions, surveys and polls conducted as to the why, what, and if regarding success or failure of Google+. The reality is that Google+ signifies the growing and intrinsic nature of search and social media; and, as adoption surges, so does the necessity of integrating and aligning search and social efforts. Google+ is going mainstream.

In December last year, Google announced that over 500 million people had upgraded to Google+ with 235 million active across Google (+1′ing apps in Google Play, hanging out in Gmail, connecting with friends in Search, etc.) and 135 million users active in just the stream.

Today, I would like to share some insights and data gathered from tracking social media adoption trends for the BrandZ top 100 global brands. This includes brands such as Apple, BMW, RedBull and Samsung. The data also includes insights into how YouTube is performing as a social media network. Here is the expanding data and insight from the BrightEdge Top 100 Brand Social Share survey.

Since December 2011 Google+ has 94X followers

Three Out Of Four Global Brands Have Active Google+ Profiles

Google+ has now established itself firmly in the mainstream of social networking. A majority of the top 100 brands (three quarters), have active profiles. As
 more brands engage users, data suggest that those who have once held reservations may soon be looking toward establishing a strong Google+ presence.

Many of the top global 100 brands recognize that Google+ is now an effective social medium through which to continuously build and strengthen relationships with existing and potential users and customers. It is an excellent avenue through which the value of their brand can be greatly enhanced. It is not only cost effective, but it also facilitates constant dialogue with users, which is essential in keeping their audience up-to-date on the latest happenings regarding their brands’ products, features and services.

20% Of Brands Link Both Home & Google+ Pages

Search for a brand in 2013, and it’s increasingly likely a Google+ page will appear in the SERP. This is an area which has seen a significant increase in the past year, and is now at one in five brands. As brands continue to attract Google+ followers, these pages look set to become a mainstay of search results.

Marketers are also now actively integrating Google+ into their brand home page, with 25% including a profile link in 2012. Three of the top 10 brands promoted their Google+ presence through links to their profile pages on their websites. These brands are Mercedes-Benz, Nissan and Samsung. Given that this was unheard of a year ago, we expect that 2013 will see many more brands follow suit.

59% Of Brands With Active Google+ Pages Engage Their Users Through Posts

Forty-four (44) of the 75 brands with active Google+ pages have provided their users with posts in the month of February 2013. Post dates for February range from 2/8/2013 to 2/16/2013.

This data set helps show that brands do recognize the importance of keeping their audience engaged and that Google+ is an increasingly preferred platform in fostering and developing such relationships with users.

The Top 10 Brands On Google+ Account For Almost 4 Out Of 5 Followers

A majority of the 20.9M followers are cornered by the top 10 brands making up 78% of the total fans (16.3M followers). The biggest player right now is H&M, which leads the way with 2.49M fans. This should come as no surprise — as we documented in previous Social Share reports, they have consistently engaged users.

Furthermore, the table below identifies the brands that have the most additional Google+ fans for 2013. This figure is simply the difference between the first scan (1/9/2013) and the latest scan (2/16/2013). This provides insight into how the brand is currently performing against an accumulated amount which discounts current performance.

It’s interesting to note that 9 out of the 10 brands that made the overall top 10 are present in this table. Samsung is the missing brand with Home Depot being the replacement.

The rankings also make interesting reading with BMW sitting at the top with in excess of 77,000 new fans.

YouTube Solidifies Google’s Position In Social Media

It’s the social networking tool no one associates with brands, but YouTube is emerging as an influential tool for companies that want to engage with their customers.

This Google subsidiary has proven itself among the top 100 brands as a powerful means of forging personal connections. With the recent improvements integrating Google+ with YouTube slider suggest, 2013 will be an even stronger year for both brands.

87% Of Top Brands Have A YouTube Channel

Eighty-seven percent (87%) of brands have an official YouTube channel, engaging fans and reaching millions of viewers. Collectively, the top 100 brands on YouTube have racked up an impressive 3.15B views.

Google: Most Viewed Of All Brands On YouTube

All eyes are on Google and Red Bull when it comes to YouTube — at 718M (Google) and 535M (Red Bull) views, these brands are head and shoulders above their competitors when it comes to capturing viewers’ attention. Samsung is in the third position with 160M views, less than a quarter of Google’s views.

The top 10 are mainly business -to-consumer brands, which shouldn’t come as a surprise. These companies already have a direct connection with potential viewers and use this to engage followers on YouTube.

Other brands would do well to study their techniques if they want to exploit the benefits of YouTube in 2013.

Top 10 Most Viewed Brands On YouTube To Date

Top 10 Most Subscribed Brands On YouTube

Redbull still remains the most subscribed brand on YouTube amongst the brands. Google and Apple maintain their position as 2nd and 3^rd ranked brands, respectively. Samsung enters the top 10 with an impressive 5^th place ranking. The changes in rankings are as follows: Nokia moving from 5^th to 6^th; BMW and Blackberry, the 8^th to 7^th  previously ranked brands, respectively, now exchanging rankings; Microsoft moving from 6^th to 9^th and Coca-Cola dropping one place down from 9^th to 10^th. Honda, the only casualty, now sits outside the top 10 in 11^th position, moving from its previously held 10^th position.

Summary

Google+ continues to gain traction among both brands and users. Brands are now quite aware of the tremendous opportunities that Google+ provides to their business. The evidence is there that users are gravitating towards Google+ as a medium through which they can follow the progress and developments of their favorite brands. For the period 1/9/2013 — 2/16/2013, brands collectively saw new Google+ fans amounting to 597,090.

The brands that link their Google+ pages and their home pages, consistently engage their users with regularly updated posts are and will continue to reap tremendous rewards using Google+.

YouTube is and will continue to be the social media powerhouse in 2013. The YouTube views simply continue to grow at an alarming rate and have seen total views among all brands surpassing the 3.2 Billion mark.

Along with the massive growth of Twitter and Facebook Google+ is firmly establishing itself as a major social media player. Each social platform has it’s own unique USP’s and its own skeptics.  Depending upon your brand, audience, search and social media goals balancing activity across all networks should be an essential part of your 2013 search and social strategy.

Google, through its YouTube and Google+ offerings, has created a highly efficient and interactive environment that satisfies the needs of both global brands as well as their users in delivering an effective social platform.

For further insight and analysis, the Social Share – January 2013 is available for free download here.

Several forces are behind this transformation. The relationship between social and search has changed. Social is now also being consumed locally and in multiple formats such as video.

Social engagement is becoming more dependent on quality content and the relationship between social and mobile, making it essential that marketers dig deeper into search, social, local and mobile data to understand how it can impact rankings.

Today, I would like to focus on five key developments that have fueled this rapid change while in parallel, sharing data and results from the BrightEdge 2013 Search Marketer Survey that was sent to over 4,500 brands and provided insight into how marketers are leveraging the change in the search and social media relationship in 2013. (Disclosure: I’m the founder and CEO of BrightEdge.)

1.  Social Media Data Fuels Most Of Big Data Growth

Social media comes in multiple data formats. In my last article, I talked about the importance of Big Data and it’s relationship with search marketing. Over the last two years, 90%of global data has been produced by digital and social content.

The adoption of smartphones and tablets, and generation of location data primarily drive the growth of social data. A breakdown of how this forms part of the big data picture is highlighted below:

from “Big Data In Small Pieces – Facebook Graph Search” by Andy Betts

2.  Growing Relationship Between Social Signals, Rank & Content

To get a sense of the magnitude of the opportunity when it comes to tapping social networks as a channel for sharing content, it is useful to look at the following statistics:

• 1 billion Facebook users
• 200 million Twitter users
• 200 million LinkedIn users
• 135 million active users on Google+
• 3.3 billion pieces of content shared on Facebook each month
• 5 billion Google +1’s a day

Source – 2012 Internet in numbers

Social signals do impact rankings. Google CEO Larry Page said as much in his speech at Zeitgeist Americas. Of course, there are challenges in search engines gaining access to social signals that may not be publicly available. However, signals like +1′s and Tweets do influence which pages are most relevant for keyword searches.

Danny Sullivan articulates the importance of social signals in search, especially Google Plus:

Anybody who cares about ranking well on Google absolutely needs to be using Google Plus. It’s so integrated with everything that they’re doing, and we can see that it can have some direct relations now as well. It’s stunning to me that people still don’t do that, and I think the people who are doing it now are going to be well ahead of others.

Social media marketers now have a huge opportunity to impact SEO, improve search rankings, and increase revenue generated through organic search. Focusing on the content of social media activities to uncover the exact areas that will boost SEO and offer actionable recommendations to increase visibility on search engines is becoming a key priority for search marketers

Over 80% of search marketer respondents from the BrightEdge survey stated that in 2013, they will focus more on social media as a productive channel to improve rank. The more the search and social teams work together, the greater the synergies in terms of rankings and sharable content. What is shared ranks, and what ranks is shared.

Moreover, content related to social engagement is the most important type of content that marketers are prioritizing in 2013. Seventy-eight percent (78%)  of the marketers surveyed stated that they will be focusing on this in 2013.

3.  Rise In Correlation Between Social Sharing & Search Performance

Understanding the exact correlation between social sharing of your pages and rank is growing in importance. It is essential, as marketers further integrate social media and SEO strategies.

Identifying this correlation and analyzing the content being shared helps marketers reinforce what’s working while adjusting social sharing activities that do not have a positive correlation.

Measuring and managing this correlation is proven to work. TinyPrints saw a 47% increase in rankings by integrating its organic search and Twitter strategies based on a clear understanding of this correlation.

At a conceptual level, this is about integrating SEO metrics with Social data. While the above discussion is about using Social for the benefit of SEO, the converse is valuable, too. I had discussed this in my earlier post, Take Twitter Campaigns To The Next Level With SEO Data.

Social media marketers trying to engage users on Twitter can utilize synergy with their SEO counterparts to:

1. Understand which topics (keywords) tracked on the SEO side are trending on Twitter
2. Identify existing pages/content already mapped to these keywords from an SEO perspective
3. Share these pages through Tweets that contain the language (keywords) used to describe the trending topics.

4.  Search, Social, Local & Mobile Are More Intertwined Than Ever

According to Google, 20 percent of all Google searches have local intent and 40 percent of Google mobile searches have local intent.  The phenomenal growth of local and mobile search and usage has meant that in order to innovate and optimize for mobile search, understanding local search is vital in 2013.

Over 75% of search marketers surveyed stated that that optimizing for local search will be more important this year.

What’s more:

• Mobile accounts for 13% of all global Internet traffic
• Over 1.3 exabytes of global mobile data traffic was generated per month in 2012.
• There are over 1.1 billion global smartphone subscribers
• There are over 5 billion mobile phone users

Hence:

Mobile & Tablet Search Optimization Is A Key Priority In 2013

As marketers optimize for local and more and more people access local information via mobile and tablet,s we have seen an increase in focus on optimizing for multiple device types.

Eighty-eight percent (88%) of search marketers from the BrightEdge survey stated that optimizing their site for mobile phones and tablets will be more important this year. This will generate even greater volumes of social data for search marketer to take advantage of.

As with desktop search, many marketers now look at mobile data and rankings to see how their own campaigns and their competitors’ are performing, and how that ties into their Web analytics.

With tablets, there will be different conversion metrics, different keywords to optimize for, and other considerations. For example, Adobe, a client and BrightEdge partner, produced the visual below on optimizing for tablets.

5.  Innovation In Search & The Social Graph Is Progressing Rapidly

Facebook’s launch of Graph Search signifies the fusion of data and social innovation. Facebook Graph Search allows you to search and be presented with results based on your personal social graph (Likes and connections). The information you are served from Facebook’s Big Data set is relevant to what your friends and connections like, and SEOs will adapt accordingly.

Depending on marketer goals for social engagement, different marketing organizations prioritize different social media channels. Looking at the survey results, we can see that Facebook and Google+ are key areas of focus for the search and social marketer this year.

Conclusion

2012 saw a rapid increase in the amount of search and social data that we use. The growth of local and mobile search has fueled the accessing and sharing of this data. In 2013, marketers are focusing on hybrid, content-driven search, social and mobile media campaigns and innovating in line with the rise of local search and social graph development.

Keeping pace with change is key challenge, but also, as the survey data suggests, a key opportunity for the search marketer this year.

You can download a free copy of all key findings in the 2013 Search Marketing Survey here.

Image via Istockphoto used under license

The phrase Big Data is everywhere. Not a day passes without the release of another report that describes the extent to which Big Data is influencing how we do business.

But, what exactly is Big Data? What does Big Data mean in the context of digital marketing? How can we be more effective search marketers using Big Data? And, what can we do to make sure we have access to Big Data that works? I will deal with these topics in this post.

Big Data Explained

Big data is a phrase often used to describe the scale of data generated across multiple disciplines including, as IBM suggests, sensors used to gather climate information, digital pictures and videos, purchase transaction records, and cell phone GPS signals. It includes massive volumes of marketing data too, spanning search, social, local and mobile analytics, across every geography.

Big Data means massive volumes of information. IBM reports that over 2.7 zetabytes of data exist in the digital universe today. With over 571 new websites being created per minute per day, IDC estimates that by 2020, business transactions on the Internet will reach 450 billion per day.

The data generated is usually categorized as structured, semi-structured and un-structured.

Structured data: this is information with a high degree of organization found in databases, data warehouses and enterprise solutions. Google is a source of ‘big data.’ In 2008, Google was already processing 20,000 terabytes of data (20 petabytes) a day.

Un-structured data: raw data that has been extracted from applications on the Internet but has not been processed into productive and more meaningful formats.

Semi-structured data: this data, depending upon your viewpoint, is where structured and unstructured data meet. Social media data, location type data, and user-generated data are examples.

The article, A Comprehensive List of Big Data Statistics, has great information on the nature and scale of Big Data. You may also find the graphic below insightful.

Infographic from Intel.com

Enterprise SEO Marketers Should Care About Big Data

There are several drivers behind the phenomenal growth of Big Data, including technological, financial and business considerations. The result is that we now have unprecedented access to deeper and broader insights into user behavior across channels such as search and social, and into key performance indicators, globally and locally.

This is a great opportunity for Enterprise SEO marketers to be more responsive to changes in user behavior and needs, and to industry developments.

No wonder Big Data is big business. Market research firm IDC forecasts that the market for Big Data is expected to grow from $3.2 billion in 2010 to $16.9 billion in 2015 in its report, Worldwide Big Data Technology and Services 2012-2015.

With the prevalence of Big Data and Big Data Enterprise SEO technologies, it makes sense to examine how marketers can make the most out of Big Data. Specifically, I will look at:

1. Search Marketing & Big Data
2. Big Data in Search & Social
3. Accuracy, Security, Reliability & Scalability in the Age of Big Data

Search Marketing & Big Data

Search has changed drastically from the time when it was all about presenting 10 big blue links for users searching from a computer. Search now includes universal search results, social profiles and content, and localized results. In addition, more users now search from their smartphones and tablets than ever before.

In fact, a Yellow Pages study estimates that 30% of search queries on its network now come from mobile. Also, Internet usage is growing in pretty much every corner of the world. From a data standpoint, not only is data generated at a staggering rate, but also spans unstructured and semi-structured data, not just static data.

This multi-dimensional nature of Big Data is a boon for marketers. Marketers can analyze their search metrics and ask themselves: what positions do I rank in, what keywords are driving traffic, what pages are converting, and how’s my lead volume, revenue and conversions?

These metrics inform critical business decisions that contribute to the bottom line. Whether an organization manages a website with dozens of pages or hundreds of thousands of pages across multiple business units and domains, having accurate SEO data is critical to SEO success.

Given the importance of Big Data in Enterprise SEO, marketers should seek out analytics providing data and understand user behavior accurately in a timely fashion. In other words, your analytics should satisfy the following criteria:

• Provide deep and broad SEO insight
• Be ready for the future

Big Data In Search & Social

We looked at how search engines process a tremendous amount of data including search queries, location-specific searches and scans for new content. Behind Google’s search algorithm is a Big Data company that processes over 20 petabytes of data each year. Beyond the search engines, social networks also process a massive dataset, which is an important consideration due to the positive correlation of social signals on search rankings.

There are currently over 1 billion Facebook users, over 500 million Twitter users and 156 million public blogs. Facebook processes 2.5 billion pieces of content, 300 million photos, 2.7 billion Like actions a day and over 500 terabytes of data each day. Twitter, our client and partner, processes over 400 million tweets daily.

When we look at video, YouTube users upload 48 hours of new video every minute. What’s more, with over 5 billion mobile phone devices in use, the convergence of social, mobile and local data creates massive amounts of data to process and make sense of.

Your Big Data analytics should utilize all this data. Look at social media activity and search performance to understand the correlation between social and search. If you are like several of our customers, you can leverage social media to drive rank like TinyPrints did.

The good news is that search and Social Big Data is not just for the SEO teams. The Social team can leverage SEO analytics to make social media campaigns more effective. Read my earlier post on this topic to understand how you can make your Twitter campaigns more effective by using SEO analytics.

Data Integrity, Security, Reliability & Scalability In The Age of Big Data

In the previous sections, we saw what Big Data means for the search and social marketer. Now, I would like to spend some time on how we can make sure that the Big Data we have actually works for us.

Specifically, I believe that four key factors determine our return from Big Data:

• Is our Big Data accurate?
• Is our Big Data secure?
• Is our Big Data available at all times?
• Does our Big Data scale?

Collating and creating Big, Valuable Data is a very expensive process and requires lots of investment and massive engineering resources to create a rigorous and high-quality set of data streams. Currently, 75% of Fortune 500 companies use cloud-based solutions, and the IDC predicts that 80% of new commercial enterprise apps will be deployed on cloud platforms.

Given these numbers, I want to address the 4 factors above in a specific context – using a cloud-based digital marketing technology platform for your Big Data needs.

1. Ensure Your Data Is As Accurate As Possible

As a search marketer, you are among the most data-driven people on this planet. You make important decisions around keywords, pages, content, link building and social media activity based on the data you have on hand.

Before gaining insight and building a plan of action based on Big Data, it’s important to know that you can trust this data to make the right decisions. While this might seem like a daunting exercise, there are a few fairly achievable steps you can take.

a. Source data from trusted sources: trust matters. Be sure that the data you, or your technology vendor, collect is from reliable sources. For example, use backlink data from credible and reputed backlink providers such as Majestic SEO, which provides accurate and up to-date information to help you manage successful backlinking campaigns.

b. Rely on data from partnerships: this is a corollary to the previous point. Without getting into the business and technical benefits of partnerships, I strongly recommend that you seek data acquired through partnerships with trusted data sources so that you have access to the latest and greatest data from these sources.

For example, if you need insight into Twitter activity, consider accessing the Twitter fire hose directly from Twitter and/or partner with a company who already has a tie-up with Twitter. For Facebook insight, use data that was acquired through the Facebook Preferred Developer Program certification. You need not go out and seek these partnerships – just work with someone who already has these relationships.

c. Avoid anything black hat: build your SEO insights and program with a white hat approach and takes a trusted partnership driven approach like the ones mentioned above.

If and when in doubt, ask around and look for validation that your technology provider has partnerships and validate it on social media sources such as Facebook and Twitter. Do not be shy about getting more information from your  technology vendors and track back to check that their origins do no tie back to black hat approaches.

2. Ensure Your Data Is Secure

You have, on your hands, unprecedented amounts of data on users and their behavior. You also have precious marketing data that has a direct impact on your business results.

With great amounts of knowledge comes even greater responsibility to guarantee the security of this data. Remember, you and your technology provider together are expected to be the trusted guardians of this data. In many geographies, you have a legal obligation to safeguard this data.

In my time at Salesforce.com, where we built the first enterprise cloud platform, I learned a lot about the right way to securely store data. Here are a few best practices that, hopefully, your technology provider follows:

1. ISO/IEC 27001 standard compliance for greater data protection
2. Government level encryption
3. Flexible password policies
4. Compliance with European Union and Swiss Safe Harbor guidelines for compliance with stringent data privacy laws

3. Ensure Your Data Is Available

Having access to the most valuable Big Data is great, but not enough – you need to have access to this data at all times. Another valuable lesson I learned at Salesforce.com is how to deliver high availability and site performance to our customers.

To achieve this, we implemented industry leading IT infrastructure including multiple layers of replication in data centers for a high level of redundancy and failover reliability, and datacenter backup facilities in separate locations for disaster recovery assurance and peace of mind. If you work with a marketing technology provider, be sure to ask them what measures they take to guarantee data availability at all times.

4. Ensure Your Data Scales With User Growth

This is the part that deals with the Big in Big Data. We saw how zetabytes of data already exist and more data is being generated at an astounding pace by billions of Internet users and transactions everyday. For you to understand these users and transactions, your technology should have the ability to process such huge volumes of data across channels and keep up with the growth of the Internet.

Scale should matter even if you are not a huge enterprise. Think about this analogy – even if you are searching for a simple recipe on Google, Google has to parse through huge volumes of data to serve the right results.

Similarly, your technology should be able to track billions of keywords and pages, large volumes of location-specific data and social signals to give you the right analytics. Be sure the technology you rely on is made for scale.

Conclusion

In 2013, we are going to hear a lot more about Big Data and search marketing. The integration and blending of search, social, local, mobile and all forms of user data creates opportunity for the CMO. Marketers who understand Big Data will be in a position to address the needs of their users and customers better and respond to industry shifts faster.

Big Data requires technological resources and investment. In order to maximize ROI from these investments, be sure that your Big Data sources give you all the data that matters to you and that your sources are credible.

Protect Big Data at all costs and have this data at your fingertips always. Be prepared to access and analyze even greater volumes of data when Big Data gets even bigger; that day is not too far away, so the best time to start is now!

Integrating your online marketing efforts is all about breaking down silos and delivering amazing results for brands and agencies. Social and SEO marketers can be a big part of this.

As marketers, our ultimate aim is to have one marketing super group with PPC, SEO, Social and Display working together seamlessly. Today though, let me focus on how you can leverage SEO data and build your own SEO-Social super group. I will use Twitter as an example to show how the SEO-Social super group works together.

Aligning Your SEO & Social Teams

For many an organization, the social team is in charge of engaging users, customers and influencers, based on their understanding of what these audiences care about. One big question that social media marketers ask is: given my engagement goals, what do I Tweet about? My answer is always a question: what matters to them?

Marketers usually answer this by scrolling down their Twitter stream, scanning and searching for keywords and hash tags that will give them a fair idea of what interests their audience. They also look across their followers and pore over their content and interests. This approach works if you have a few users interested in a limited range of topics. Look across hundreds of followers and you have a problem of scale.

Now, let us look at the SEO side. The SEO team has done an excellent job with on-page optimization and has a great link profile compared to the competition. The next logical step is to use social media to improve your already impressive rank. Maybe on-page optimizations and link outreach alone won’t help break into the Top Ten. Social media holds the key to making that breakthrough and the stage is set for collaboration.

How To Create Your SEO & Social Super Group

Step 1 – Think Keywords

Keywords are relevant to your audiences since that is how they search for the topics and themes that interest them. Also, content with these keywords has a greater chance of capturing their attention, interest and mindshare. So, when you ask What matters to my users?, try to picture that in terms of keywords.

SEOs know keywords. They go through the motions of elaborate keyword discovery in their quest for greater rank and conversions for their pages. Tap into this knowledge to identify keywords that matter to your users. If your SEO team tracks a huge number of keywords, especially long-tail ones, just eyeball the list and pick groups of related keywords that are most relevant to users.

The essence of this step is greater than simply identifying keywords – it’s also about adopting a mindset where you think of your audiences’ interests in terms of keywords, the exact words they use to describe their interests.

Step 2 – Identify Keywords Trending In Social Media

For the keywords identified in Step 1, look for metrics that will help you evaluate how much the keywords/themes map  on to your users’ interests. Below are two metrics that can help you get started:

1. Absolute number of Tweets with keywords - For each keyword, look at the absolute number of Tweets that include that keyword for this week – let us call this the Twitter Keyword Volume.
2. Week-on-week change in number of Tweets -  Look out for trends. Do you spot any keywords, which have a higher Twitter Keyword Volume for this week compared to the previous week or the week before? For the purpose of this article, ‘trending’ means a bump in the Twitter Keyword Volume week-on-week. It also makes sense to define different degrees of trending — keywords with a 50-100% change in keyword volume could be considered ‘moderate’ and 100%+ change can be ‘strong’ trending. Large changes are only meaningful if the absolute volume is a significant number.

Twitter Keyword Volume captures what matters to users right now. A bump in Twitter Keyword Volume for that keyword means that topic is trending and is of rising importance to users. This is a great opportunity to take advantage of the growing momentum for this topic.

Now start collecting the data:

1. Begin with the keyword portfolio you selected in Step 1.
2. Measure the Twitter Keyword Volume for all keywords.
3. Then see what percentage of keywords are trending strong, moderate, weak and not at all.
4. Utilize this data for prioritization (see the next step).

Step 3 – Prioritize keywords For Driving Twitter Activity

Choosing the right keywords to target based on what matters to users is a vital part of the process and also helps you prioritize your social media efforts. Here are a few approaches:

1. Capitalize on keywords that are trending strongly immediately. Assign top priority to these keywords. Time is of the essence. If you see a mix of strong and moderate trending keywords, first pick all strong trending keywords and then choose a few moderate trending keywords, too, depending on your bandwidth.
2. Check to see if the topics overlap with existing campaigns you have scheduled. If yes, you could prioritize some of the  keywords relevant to these campaigns. Again, use the trending data to decide which keywords get special treatment.
3. If you have unlimited time and resources, you can skip to the next step! If not, assess bandwidth available for Twitter activity.  When you select the keywords/topics, consider how many Tweets you send out daily/weekly/monthly and how much effort is required. I recommend you start small, get a feel for the process and show results you can measure before expanding your target keyword set.

At the end of this step, you should have a list of keywords which will be at the core of your Twitter strategy.

Step 4 – Map Existing Pages To Trending Keywords

SEOs know keyword-page mapping. Share your list of target keywords and ask them what pages are best optimized for each of these keywords.

Now is also a great time to refine your keyword priorities –  if you see some pages that are high performing in terms of rank or conversions, you could increase the priority for the keywords that map on to these pages.

Let us summarize the data we have so far – you should now have a list of keywords related to the topics that matter to your users and which will help you prioritize your Twitter efforts, and you have the pages (content) which are optimized for these keywords.

Step 5 – Craft Your Tweets

I have used the word ‘craft’ in this case because it’s not just about Tweet volume — it’s all about sending the right Tweet content in the right language at the right time. The right placement will also help you.

The Right Time: This stems from the keywords that are trending now. You can further refine the timing by testing the time of the day, days of week and so on.

The rRght Language: You know in what exact terms your users think about their topics of interest. Include these keywords in your Tweets since you know that Tweets with such keywords are trending. You could have them in the body of the Tweet or in the hash tags. You’ll need to test – more on this in Step 6.

The Right Content: This maps on to the pages that are optimized for these keywords. Include the URL of these pages in the Tweets.

You can see some ideas on how to construct Tweets in the article How To Tweet What You Want, Because Content Matters.

The right placement: Promoted Tweets place your Tweets on top of the search results page when a user searches for a trend (keyword) or on top of a user’s home timelines when that Tweet is relevant to the user.

Not only does promoting Tweets improve visibility for your Tweets but it also helps you test if your Tweets strike a chord with users a la keyword discovery using AdWords. This primer on Promoted Tweets on the Twitter site should help you get started. If you have a budget, think about Promoted Tweets.

Step 6 – Measure Your Success, Fine-Tune & Use The Findings For Future Campaigns

Let us now review how Steps 1 through 6 should work. Tweets with the right keywords and well-crafted content will catch your users’ attention at the time the related topic has momentum and lead to more clicks from users. This should also increase user engagement, as reflected in the rise in number of followers (the ones that matter) as you Tweet and conversions on the landing pages.

How do you make sure this happens? Fine-tuning your tactics based on your knowledge of the target audience and a lot of A/B testing holds the key. The goal of your testing is to answer some of the following questions:

1. Should the keywords be at the beginning?
2. Should the Tweets include keywords as hashtags?
3. What tone works best?
4. What time of the day and week works best?
5. Are Promoted Tweets paying off?

Just remember, you have a narrow time window to test what’s working. Try to keep any testing plans simple and easy-to-implement. To enable this testing and know what’s working, you need two things: metrics (from Twitter and your site) and a tracking mechanism to capture these metrics.

Twitter Metrics: It is always good to analyze metrics and activity directly on Twitter. Look at the number of clicks on the Tweet URLs, Re-Tweets and Favorites to get a sense of whether your Tweets are actually engaging users.

Also, look at the change in number of followers. To be reasonably confident that this change is due to your Twitter tactics, try not to play around with too many variables at the same time.

I would also advice gathering some subjective feedback as part of this process. For example:

1. Which Tweets drive comments and which don’t?
2. How are they labeled?
3. How do they reference the content?
4. Do they have hashtags? How many?
5. Did you gain any new keyword ideas?

Site Metrics: When users Re-Tweet, Favorite or click on the links in your Tweet or Re-Tweet, that’s a great first step – it means your Tweet caught their attention. That’s only a great first step though, a means to an end. The true test of whether you are engaging users is if, after clicking on your link, whether they take meaningful action on your site i.e. they convert. A few examples of metrics you can track on your site are:

1. Page views
2. Time on site
3. Bounce rate
4. Conversions – downloads, registrations, forms submitted

If at least some of these metrics for your landing pages improve, that’s great news!

Tracking Mechanism: To isolate the impact of your Twitter tactics so you know what’s working and what’s not, you need a way to track the results of your testing and attribute success to them. Link shorteners or markers on your Web analytics platform that call out where the traffic originates are useful.

For better tracking, run these as campaigns: choose a handful of keywords and pages, select a time window, choose one or some of the metrics above and track them closely during that time. Do not vary anything else during this time window and act fast.

Remember, you want to capture your audience’s attention at the crest of the wave. If you miss the bus, don’t worry — your learnings may be applicable to the next campaign.

Step 7 – Collaborate: Both Social & SEO Teams Win

The SEO team is not just a benefactor; it’s a beneficiary, too. Social signals matter in SEO as Google and Bing have explicitly stated.  The “halo effect” from sites that latch on to these Tweets influences search engine rankings.

Not only does social positively influence SEO, it also brings traffic. Hence, if your SEO team needs more social media traction for some pages, they can work with the Social team, as described above, and tweet more strategically.

Your SEO team can then  measure what’s working by correlating rank for those pages with the number of Tweets for the same pages. As the number of Tweets went up for pages being shared by your Social team, was there a positive correlation with rank?

It’s worth noting that you don’t have to get a million Tweets to impact rank. Adobe improved rank for one of its key pages from twenty-eighth to second through only seven Tweets as described in the article, How Adobe Uses Search Data to Drive Cross-Channel Sales.

Case In Point: Performics & Feeding America

Leading digital marketing agency Performics sought to help Feeding America use Twitter to create greater awareness about its activities and take targeted actions such as donating and volunteering.

Driving the right traffic to specific pages on its site was a necessary first step. Performics pretty much followed the process outlined in Steps 1 through 6 to reach specific keyword-oriented audiences and direct them to targeted pages about hunger-related issues. Through these efforts, Feeding America saw a whopping 250% rise in traffic from Twitter compared to Tweets sent without the keyword-based process above.

You can learn more about how Performics achieved such outstanding results for Feeding America on the Twitter Developer website.

Conclusion

Listening to the Twitter “firehose” of data and seeking the keywords and pages optimized for search drives great impact in social media. Conversely, leaning on social and measuring its influence on search is going to become more and more important during the course of 2013.

Integrating your search and social efforts brings better brand visibility and higher conversion rates. The key is to present the right content to the users at the time they need it in an engaging manner, across all the channels they visit.

By collaborating with the SEO team, your Social team knows what matters to users and has the content to back it up at the right time. Internally, your SEO team benefits from social promotions. You have finally fostered collaboration across your search and social teams based on real data!

As the Google SERP continues to evolve and brands aim to increase their control over search results, the emergence of a new type of SERP has interesting implications for SEO Managers.

Since August, Google has been serving for some keywords, SERPs with 7 organic listings, instead of the usual 10 listings as discussed in 7 Is The New 10? Google Showing Fewer Results & More From Same Domain.

This fits in with what Google says is its ultimate goal – “Overall, our goal is to provide the most relevant results for a given search query as possible.”

While this change has caused an expected uproar from many a marketer, a large opportunity presents itself for brands that invest in universal search techniques.  Not only can brand sites dominate the Google SERP with multiple results from a single site, but also negative content can be combatted and pushed out of the first page.

Now that the ‘dust has settled,’ so to speak, I want to walk you through these changes and explain what this means to a search marketer. These recommendations are based on an analysis of SERPs, using a wide sample of 26,000 keywords across industries including: Technology –  B2B, Technology – B2C, Financial Services and Retail.

In this article, I will cover:

1. The exact nature of the Google 7 change
2. How widespread the change is and what triggers this change
3. Impact of change on traffic and conversions
4. Adjusting keyword rank reporting
5. Adjusting keyword goals
6. Targeting universal search and blended rank

A New Google SERP: Seven Results Accompanied By Breakout Sitelinks

In the below screenshot, you can see that when I type [twitter] in the Google search bar, the Google SERP displays seven, not ten, natural blue link results. The first result has breakout sitelinks.

Now, if I type in [Toyota], you see a similar pattern – a set of seven results, with the first result having breakout sitelinks. In addition to the seven organic results, there is a Places pack also with links to Toyota dealerships near my location (set to Los Angeles, California).

Page 2 and page 3 look the same in the number of results before and after the change. However, the first result on page 2 is what used to be in position 8 in the older version of page 1.

Change Is Widespread: Number Of Keywords Affected Varies By Industry

While the observations I made above may be helpful, the real value lies in understanding how widespread this change is and where it occurs.

To examine this more closely, the team at BrightEdge looked at a random sample of 26,000 keywords across the Technology – B2B, Technology – B2C, Financial Services, and Retail industries to identify patterns. Here is what we found:

1.  Virtually all keywords with seven results have sitelinks.

We noticed that almost 95% of keywords with seven results also have breakout sitelinks. We also found that the sitelinks show up on all keywords that are brand keywords. So, you can expect that all branded keywords – for you and your competition – will now have seven link results.

2.  The number of keywords affected increased four times after August 20^th.

Since the change was first noticed on August 20^th, the number of keywords with seven results increased four times. As we monitored the changes, we realized that what started as an experiment by Google was clearly being rolled out on a wide scale and consistently across data centers and regions.

At the time of this writing, this change is visible in North America and Europe, and several countries in Asia and South America.

3.  With 8% of keywords affected, this change touches more keywords than Panda.

The percentage of keywords impacted is currently 8% across the industries we examined. This is significant, considering that a critical update like Panda affected 5% of searches.

4.  The number of keywords affected varies by industry.

We have found that the impact varies by industry. The Technology – B2B sector has 9.4% of its keywords affected, while Technology – B2C industry sees 12.1% keywords impacted. Financial Services industry has about 2.7% of keywords affected, and about 3.5% of keywords in Retail are impacted by this change.

The Change Impacts Traffic & Conversions

The impact of this change on your traffic and conversions may be significant.  This is especially true if you previously ranked between 8 and 10. In this case, without any changes in your rankings, your presence has changed from the first page to the second page. As a result of this, you will most likely see a decrease in website performance.

We all know that click-through-rates vary by the page on which the result shows up. Traffic from keywords in positions 8-10 (now on page 2) will decrease. Instead, your traffic will be similar to what usually comes from positions 10-12.

Even if you were ranking between 1 through 7, it may be worth taking a closer look at the keywords which are affected. You may just find that you end up with a higher visibility on the first page and therefore, an increase in website performance. Indeed, keywords above the fold will continue to get most of the traffic and might even see an uptick, due to fewer choices on page 1. This is one of the most serious implications of the Google change.

Keep two things in mind. First, unless your competitors are greatly ahead of you, they will see equivalent drops. Second, if you realize your keywords have dropped out of page 1, take a closer look to spot what’s behind this change – the new Google SERP or declining SEO performance. It may well be possible that your rank stayed the same, but page 1 simply shows fewer results.

As we just saw, the ‘Google 7’ change impacts all brand terms, many with significant search volume. This impact could be extended to other keyword categories in the future by Google.  The following steps may be helpful if you find yourself affected  by this change:

1. Adjust your keyword rank reporting.
2. Re-think your keyword goals.
3. Pay greater attention to blended search and measure blended rank.

Adjust Your Keyword Rank Reporting

If some of your keywords have been impacted, you will need to make adjustments to your keyword reporting. Make sure your keyword tracking technology reflects this.

For instance, for keywords with 7 results, positions 8, 9, and 10 should be reported as falling on page 2; for keywords with 8 results, positions 9 and 10 should be reported as appearing on page 2, and so on.

If it is not possible to configure your technology to reflect this, ask your technology provider to do so. You may also want to investigate how your technology provider keeps up with Google’s algorithm changes as these changes are becoming more frequent.

If you do a lot of reporting outside your tool, or you use Excel for keyword performance tracking, you may have to make these adjustments manually. 
Beware – this might get a little tedious if you are tracking a lot of keywords.

Adjust Your Keyword Goals

If your keywords are impacted by this change, you also need to recalibrate your keyword goals. Adjust your goals to reflect the ‘new real estate reality’ for some of your keywords.

Finding keywords within striking distance should now start with selecting keywords on page 2. In your keyword ranking technology, don’t filter by position 1-10 to find these keywords. Instead, use ‘Page 2’ filters to identify these keywords.

The target rank on these shorter pages should be position 7 and above.

Keep An Eye on Universal Search & Blended Rank

It is important to note that seven organic results does not preclude universal results from showing up.  The screen below shows that a search for ‘Cisco’ reveals seven blue links and a ‘News’ section highlighted by the red box.

We saw that the ‘Toyota’ example (at the beginning of this post) displayed Places results too. The presence of Universal Search results, in a SERP with seven organic results, has serious implications for marketers.

First, ranking in universal search becomes even more significant since relevant news, image, video, social, and local results take up a greater proportion of SERP real estate. Second, search marketers must measure organic rank as well as their blended rank, which measures rank by taking into consideration all the listings on a page.

Tracking rank among the organic text results in the new SERPs is necessary but having blended search strategies and visibility into blended rank increases your ability to dominate page 1.

We expect this trend to continue as Google is putting more emphasis on universal results, displaying image, video, social, and local results to make search results more relevant to the user. Read this article to understand why universal search matters to users. To learn more about the significance of blended rank, see Nag Patta’s piece on the BrightEdge blog, SEO is like the Olympics.

Another dimension is the Google Search Plus Your World update. With this update, Google signals a greater importance for Google+ pages in the search algorithm and now offers Google+ Local as part of its Google+ initiative. Again, I see this as a special type of universal search and further highlights the importance of ranking in universal search results to grab a greater share of the SERP.

Conclusion

Google showing three less search results for brand names on its SERP may seem like no big deal. However, it is. As Google focuses on improving the quality of its search results, brands are presented with a number of opportunities to dominate the search results through more than just blue text links. As with any update, and as documented in this article, results and corresponding strategy and tactics vary by sector.

The key takeaway is that Google’s quest for quality and relevancy provides you an opportunity – optimizing your search campaigns across multiple search types, and in multiple formats, puts your brand not just in a position to win, but also to dominate the new Google SERP.

Since its announcement, we have seen a huge change in shopping results. Google Shopping listings replace the current Google Product Search listings, which are part of the organic search listings.

In this post, I will explain what Google Shopping is all about, how it affects retail merchants and outline steps to mitigate the impact and seize opportunity.

The Old Model

Since 2002, Google has been listing relevant products when users searched using keywords with commercial intent. Google acquired the information for these listings through two sources – its own crawls of websites with product information and the products feeds supplied by vendors through the Google Merchant Center. These listings were part of Universal Search results, in addition to organic results.

These enhanced the shopping experience for end users. Note that Google did not charge merchants for displaying their listings. The screen shot below shows how the SERP looked before the change when a user search for ‘digital camera’:

The section of the SERP highlighted by the red box is titled “Shopping Results for Digital Camera” and it is here that you see images of specific brands with their technical specifications and prices.

The New Google Shopping Model

In its announcement of Google Shopping through paid inclusion, Google stated that the current Product Search Listings would be replaced by Paid Listings based on Google Product Listing Ads.

Google stated that by moving to a paid model Google will ensure that businesses will keep product information, availability, and prices updated at all times which, Google hopes, will result in a better shopping experience for users and better results for merchants.

The change to Google Shopping, as you will see, is already underway and Google expects to complete it this fall. But we already know that the switch to Google Shopping has several implications for users and merchants, let’s review them now.

1.  The SERP looks different

Search with product related queries and the SERP already looks a little different. This is what users now see when they search for ‘digital cameras’:

As you can see, the section for “shopping results” has been removed and on the right column of the screen, you can see a catalogue-styled layout under the heading, “Shop for digital cameras on Google” called out as ‘Sponsored’.

Now, your potential customers can see larger images of digital cameras on the search screen.

Let’s say that you wanted to narrow down your digital camera search to a specific camera — the Canon Rebel T3i. You type the product name in the search box and this is what you get:

Notice that you have even more information related to this specific product showing up on the search page. This means that your customers can see the different retailers offering the same product and their price (like the listing by Dell above), make price comparisons and choose the retailer they want to buy the camera through (hopefully you).

At a later date, you will even have the ability to advertise special sales and deals right on the search engine page to attract potential buyers.

2.  Signing up for Google Shopping is different

Not only does Google Shopping create a new shopping experience for customers, but it also redefines the process that you, as a merchant, must take in relation to product listing.

In order to get your listings on Google Shopping and take advantage of this new ranking system, you will need a Google Merchant Center account and an Adwords account, and bid for the product listings.

The placement of your listing within the Google Shopping results will be determined by your bid price as well as relevancy of the product for the search query.

3.  Our data shows a 94% shift in Google Product Search listings

Google’s transition to PLA (Product Listing Ads) is already producing data that shows the effect on e-commerce companies as captured by our analysis at BrightEdge.

We scanned about 90,000 keywords with commercial intent in the retail segment to understand the effect of the Google announcement on the old Google Product Search listings. We observed that 94% of the keywords which had Google Product Search Listings before June 3, 2012 now do not have any. Note that this change relates to search results in Google.com.

We are already seeing a huge trend in Shopping Listing switching to Product Listings as Google offers incentives to users in the US such as monthly credit for 10% of their total Product Listing Ad spend through 2012 if they set up Product Listings Ads by 15th August 2012. It is logical to assume that this will happen in the UK and other markets early next year.

Getting The Most Out Of The New Google Shopping Opportunity

While it is too early to make a statement about the impact of Google Shopping results on conversion rates for retailers, we do see opportunities by signing up for Google Shopping now.

Optimize high-value low-performing organic keywords for Google Shopping

One way to make the most of the Google Shopping change is to identify keywords where you don’t have a presence above the fold in organic.

• Bid on the products for which you have pages optimized for these keywords.*
• If you have tight integration with SEO, Analytics & PPC technology, you can then measure the impact of Google Shopping ad spend on and conversions (organic, shopping and total)
• By dialing the spend on these keywords up and down, you can identify the keywords where synergies exist between organic and shopping conversions – dial up the spend for these keywords and maximize total conversions.
• For keywords with cannibalization, reduce spend on Google Shopping

The key is to test the impact of spend on organic, Shopping and total conversions.

Capitalize on your Google Merchant Center presence

Bidding for Google Shopping placement is more complicated than plain AdWord bidding – retailers need to setup product feeds sharing detailed product specifications, inventory and pricing information in Google Merchant Center according to Google guidelines.

If your product feeds are already setup on Google Merchant Center, you may have an early-mover advantage over retailers who do not or have not thought about it yet.

As you can see, making the decision to sign up on Google Shopping may present an opportunity to expand your business. However, as a company, you also need to consider the trade-off involved since you now have to pay Google in order to list your products and appear in Google Shopping.

Therefore, it is important to consider all of these factors when considering joining Google Shopping.

Moving Forward

Sometimes it’s all too easy to focus on the cost/allocation dilemma of a new product launch. While some merchants debate using Google Adwords, split budgets, or simply not using the new Google Shopping, moving from a free listing system to a new system clearly has opportunities.

It also provides more visibility into what factors will increase a retailer’s market share will lead to improved conversions and more sales if you follow some of the tips I shared in this article.

If you do choose to bid take advantage of the New Google Shopping listings, there are a few different sources we recommend for advice on how to get properly set up on the new Google Shopping search engine.

1. To set up an Adwords account, visit http://google.com/adwords.
2. To set up your Google Merchant account, (if you don’t already have one), go to http://google.com/merchants.
3. Google has set up a new Google Trusted Stores program to boost buyer confidence.  As a result, merchants with the Google Trusted Stores badge on their website will have an advantage over retailers who do not.  For more information on this program, visit the Trusted Stores help section.
4. If you need additional help with your product listing setup, we think this is another great source to use: Google e-Commerce blog.
5. Great overview of the change and context: Google Product Search To Become Google Shopping, Use Pay To Play Model

Going forward, providing more visibility into what factors will increase a retailer’s market share will lead to improved conversions and more sales if you follow some of the tips I shared in this article.

Editors’ Postscript: clarification to bidding strategy provided by the author after publication.