How Social Campaign Audits Can Inform Your SEO

While not a direct ranking factor in Google's algorithm, a strong social presence can still help bolster a brand's search visibility.

Social has continued its growth trajectory into a key marketing channel for businesses, but what impact — if any — does it have on your SEO campaign? And can we improve our measurement of social success?

Though Google’s head of webspam Matt Cutts has repeatedly stated that social media signals do not currently influence SEO rankings (and though Google has recently dropped authorship annotation from its search results pages), Google remains invested in understanding social/authority signals and incorporating these signals into its algorithm on some level.

The expectation that Google will increasingly shift algo weight towards social signals — from any source — remains a driving force for the adoption of improved social media campaigns in the digital marketing blend.

But, in fact, there is already plenty of benefit to closely monitoring social success for SEO benefit.

Driving Traffic & Capturing Backlinks

The obvious areas of indirect influence for SEO are increased visibility for your landing pages and a concomitant increase in backlinking. But how can we improve on this process by adjusting social activity?

Assessing performance requires a benchmark, and in social circles nothing beats comparison with your direct competitors. The excellent TrueSocialMetrics (TSM) provides this competitive intelligence and is my current tool of choice for social campaign analysis.

Let’s walk through an example analysis using European footwear brands because, hey, I like shoes! I’m also a huge Clarks shoe fan, so I’ll walk them across Europe (pun intended…sorry!).

TSM uses conversion, amplification and applause rates to normalise across multiple social media platforms (a Facebook Like and a Google +1 are both “applause,” for example).

Taking a look at Spain, and comparing Clarks against a few of the stronger European shoe retailers, we can see that sheer volume of followers makes amplification and applause rates easier to achieve.

With a lower follower count, Clarks struggles to get traction against its Spanish social media activity.

In fact, we can see that Zalando has an excellent overall engagement rate (Likes + Shares + Comments) across Facebook in Spain, getting twice as much engagement for half as many posts as their direct competitor JustFab.

Excellent Facebook activity in Spain pays off for Zalando with twice as much engagement for half the effort of their nearest competitor.

Running a set of 500 generic Spanish terms through Searchlens gets the relative rankings for these two and shows Zalando is very strong for the all-important top three positions. (On desktops, 83% of page one organic clicks in Google go to the top 4 listings.)

Zalando and other brands with strong social media presence in Spain – Sarenza especially – outperform Clarks.es for the most valuable 500 organic search terms in the industry.

Zalando and other brands with strong social media presence in Spain – Sarenza especially – outperform Clarks.es for the most valuable 500 organic search terms in the industry.

Where Clarks does do well for engagement, they use classic styles with a clear image and short statements, usually relating the item to Summer fashion.

Unsuccessful posts tend to not use the classic style, and are darker in tone generally.

Less successful are darker-toned images.

So what does Zalando do so well? They give fashion advice along with their product images.

Fashion tips go down well for Zalando’s audience on Facebook in Spain.

We can dig into our analytics at this point to run calculation on actual traffic driven from each network, and take the social post landing page URLs for backlink exports from Google Webmaster Tools to be tracked over time.

Using this approach, you’ll be able to show a direct correlation between backlinks gained and social traffic. As a bonus, of course, you’ll be able to tie direct sales back to your social campaign at this stage, too.

Given we know that backlinks are integral to SEO performance, we’ll be improving our site performance by taking the learning from our simple social campaign analysis above (use classic images, with a light sunny style, and combine them with accessory or outfit combinations) to build our organic backlink profile naturally at a faster rate over time, thanks to our improved social campaign.

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Facebook Goes After “Click-Bait” Headlines With News Feed Update

The social network will use time people spend reading stories off Facebook as a quality signal.

Facebook turned up the heat against “click-bait” today, announcing a News Feed algorithm change that it says will reduce the number of misleading and vague headlines that its users see.

“‘Click-baiting’ is when a publisher posts a link with a headline that encourages people to click to see more, without telling them much information about what they will see,” Facebook research scientist Khalid El-Arini and product specialist Joyce Tang wrote in a blog post. ”

Posts like these tend to get a lot of clicks, which means that these posts get shown to more people, and get shown higher up in News Feed.”

Click-bait exists because it’s often effective. It plays upon people’s natural curiosity, and has become so pervasive that several Twitter accounts — see @HuffPoSpoilers and @SavedYouAClick — have popped up to poke fun.

Facebook says its users don’t like it; even though they might click, 80% surveyed say they prefer headlines that give them a fuller picture about what’s behind the link.

Since it would be difficult for Facebook to identify click-bait through language analysis, it’s going to track how users behave after they’ve clicked through to a story, assuming that people who are fooled won’t linger on the link. Here’s Facebook’s explanation of what it will be looking at:

One way is to look at how long people spend reading an article away from Facebook. If people click on an article and spend time reading it, it suggests they clicked through to something valuable. If they click through to a link and then come straight back to Facebook, it suggests that they didn’t find something that they wanted. With this update we will start taking into account whether people tend to spend time away from Facebook after clicking a link, or whether they tend to come straight back to News Feed when we rank stories with links in them.

Another factor we will use to try and show fewer of these types of stories is to look at the ratio of people clicking on the content compared to people discussing and sharing it with their friends. If a lot of people click on the link, but relatively few people click Like, or comment on the story when they return to Facebook, this also suggests that people didn’t click through to something that was valuable to them.

For marketers and others who publish on Facebook, this move should be another signal to be straightforward on the platform. Facebook is continually tuning the algorithm to improve the “quality” of the News Feed, which Facebook defines as stories and content that keep its users occupied and coming back for more. In this case, that means tell your readers clearly and plainly what to expect from a link.

Facebook Also Cracks Down On Caption Links

In a related update, Facebook also announced today that it will rank “link posts” higher than posts with links in photo captions. It’s a significant change since many publishers use a posting-links-within-captions strategy to take advantage of the higher reach that photos have historically achieved on Facebook.

Facebook said users prefer to see the extra information provided by link posts; Danny Sullivan has a detailed look at the change.

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What Is Black Hat Social Media & Does It Affect SEO?

You know about black hat search, now look at the impact this emerging practice may be having on rankings.

Black hat social media is emerging quickly and spawning a new era of web spam. This affects the social media sites themselves, the users, and the businesses utilizing the site for marketing. 

While many people are starting to recognize this trend, there is a dearth of information on how black hat social media influences search engine optimization (SEO). So let’s open up the topic.

What Is Black Hat Social Media?

First off, “black hat” is a phrase originally coined to refer to a type of hacker — one who “violates computer security for little reason beyond maliciousness or for personal gain.” In the search marketing world, “black hat SEO” refers to techniques and tactics that increase search engine rankings in ways that fall outside of the search engines’ guidelines or terms of service. (Conversely, “white hat SEO” refers to SEO techniques and tactics that are ethical — i.e., fall within the search engines’ guidelines.)

You won’t find many definitions for “black hat social media,” so allow me to define it here. Black hat social media is an attempt to utilize a social media site for some kind of gain, using methods that are outside the social media website’s guidelines.

Examples Of Black Hat Social Media

So what are some examples of black hat social media, you ask? Well, allow me to list a few.

• Buying fake Likes, YouTube Subscribers, +1s, etc. from click farms
• Sharing hyperlinks that pose a security risk
• Using a program to automatically follow and unfollow new accounts
• Creating fake social media profiles to like, share, comment or gather information
• Writing fake negative reviews on competitors’ pages or positive reviews on your own
• Securing social profiles with competitors’ names, ranking them in Google, and posting negative comments

These are just a few examples of black hat social media. But really, there are so many ways you can use social media to positively or negatively impact a business that are outside of the social site’s intended purpose.

Ways It Can Influence Google Search

Now we get to the heart of the matter. Can black hat social media impact SEO? Let’s take a look at several hypothetical examples, and then we can leave it up to the community to decide.

• Buying Fake Followers, Likes And Shares. According to Search Engine Land, “Social signals are emerging as ranking factors as search engines determine how to leverage our social interaction and behavior.” Most SEO professionals will agree that social signals have some impact on SEO, even if they’re not a direct ranking factor.

For example, if one were to buy likes, tweets, +1s and shares to fake an interaction with content, this could falsely inflate the content’s level of authority, especially if the profile listing this social interaction is public and crawlable by Google.

• Optimizing Fake Accounts. When people create fake accounts, they have the ability to operate under an alias. For example, if I create a fake account with a competitor’s name and optimize it, this fake account may rank for the competitor’s name. Users will then see that profile in Google search.

If the fake account outranks any of the competitor’s real web properties, that can hurt them by impinging on their click share. Or, if what is displayed in the search listings deters the user, that could hurt the overall brand image/reputation.

• Fake Reviews. Unfortunately, I have seen this black hat social media strategy pretty often, mostly due to my years working in online reputation management. Someone will leave a fake negative review about a business on a social media site, and it will stick! This can really hurt the business if the negative review ranks well, and a potential customer finds the review upon performing a web search.

Furthermore, reviews that contain the appropriate structured data markup can display as a rich snippet in search results — and users seeing a low star count for a business may decide to take their business elsewhere. There has also been a great deal of discussion about whether negative reviews impact SEO (and if so, how), but there is no clear answer on this.

• Poor Quality Social Sites. We all know that in the SEO world today, if you get a link from the wrong website it can become a major issue. This begs the question: “Could a share from the wrong social media website hurt your SEO?”

As we see in link evaluation tools like Majestic SEO, links are generally gauged based on the domain/page authority, topical relevance, etc. So if you have thousands of shares from spammy, off-topic social media profiles, could that hurt your rankings?

Will Black Hat Social Media For SEO Be An Issue In The Future?

There is no way to know for sure, but with the rise in social media as a marketing method, there is good reason to think that this will be a growing field. Many people speculate that social media shares, likes and interactions will become more important to SEO in the future, so it seems clear that people will try to game the system.

What Can You Do About It?

Each social media site is unique, and each situation where black hat social media may hurt SEO is also unique. While that is true, there are some tools you can use to fight blackhat social media.

• Mark Things As Spam. Almost all social media sites have the ability to mark things as spam.
• Contact Legal. Most social media sites have an area to contact the company’s legal department; this can be effective if you have a legitimate claim.
• Report Spam On Google. If something should get ranked in Google, you can also use the good old webspam reporting form on Google.

Blackhat social media is out there and it is hard to deny that there’s no way it can hurt SEO. This piece is meant to open up the conversation, not necessarily be a comprehensive guide or study, especially in this realm with so many question marks.

What do you think? Is blackhat social media a threat today? Will it be a larger threat in the future?

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Pinterest gets with the times and adds direct messaging

The pinning social network looks to be a conversation starter with its new messaging feature.

Pinterest is growing up to be a tried and true social network. The digital scrapbooking service announced Wednesday that its users can now send each other direct messages.

Letting users message each other opens the horizons of the social network -- it means users can now plan projects and events together or just swap creative ideas and discoveries. The messaging feature also works for multiple people.

"Say you're organizing a camping trip with friends -- try sending Pins to the whole gang so you can figure out where to go and what meals to make," Pinterest product designer Tom Watson wrote in a blog post. "If you need a reminder of who's bringing what, just pull up the conversation right from your notifications.

Direct messaging is meant to be an addition to the "send a pin" feature Pinterest rolled out in May 2013. This idea now is that when users receive a pin, they can reply with a message or send back another pin.

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