How to Change Your Google Ranking Through B2B Social Media
Fri, Feb 4, 2011
Janet Driscoll Miller, President and CEO, Search Mojo spoke at MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Forum on Your Social Presence and Its Impact on SEO. Although the title is long and SEO friendly the gist of this session taught companies how to control their brand through social media when someone Googles your company. If you haven’t Googled your company yet, you might want to start there before you read this blog post.
Janet wasted no time by pointing out, “go and get your profile on every medium for your brand before someone else or your competitor does.” Yes this is a hassle, but in the long run it is going to save you a lot of time and money when someone squats on your brand profile or a competitor takes it. Once you have done that you need to make sure that the profile available for your brand is separate from your personal profile, which I agree is very important in a B2B company.
One term she brought up that I have never heard of before was QDF, Query Deserves Freshness. This means that blog posts can outrank traditional websites when content is fresh regarding “hot” topics. She recommends using Google Insights to search on keywords, brand names and competitors. When you see a spike in traffic on a certain keywords, you should immediately write a blog post on that topic. Along with using QDF, companies need to learn how to identify their inbound links, to address the issue of a blogger covering their company and not providing a link back. A few tools she recommends using are Trackur and Radian6. I would like to add one free tool to her list that I find very useful, Addictomatic.
Other topics she covered that will help SEO rankings are; social media sharing, social ranking signals, and increasing your social signal circle. I’m not going to delve into social sharing because pretty much everyone knows what it is, how to do it, and how it helps your ranking. What Janet means by social ranking signals is the idea that a company’s twitter stature will help influence how a page ranks in web search. To do this go to SEO MOZ, type in your twitter profile url, and check your page rank. If it’s low you might need to build out your profile with more keywords, use a url, and start tweeting more. The last suggestion Janet made is to increase your social circle by following prospects, get fans for your brand on your Facebook page and try to increase your social sharing presence.
In conclusion, Janet recommened to create a corporate blog (hosted on your website), get all of your brand’s social profiles, put as much content up there as you can, and make sure you interlink everything. How are you using social media to improve your Google results?
Alexis Karlin is B2B Digital Marketing Specialist at Neolane by day. By night, she is a Masters student, recreational cooker and huge fan of penguins. Follow Alexis on Twitter @akarlin.
Tags: Google ranking, marketingprofs, mpforum
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The transition between registering all the social media accounts with your brands name, and “Query Deserves Freshness”, is what do you do with all these registered but unused social media accounts?
Is it acceptable for them to sit empty. How many connections do you need before you actively monitor or put time into the platform?
Depending on the size of your team, the focus should be put on quality content and engagement. Make the pages that they do find referencing your company, be filled with history and personality. Empty profile pages that actually get views, take away from any social proof that has been built.
Good article overall, but I do think the quanity vs quality discussion fits in we’ll here.
Hi Josh,
I think that is what she was getting to towards the end of the presentation, now that you have everything set up you need to go and post content to them.
I personally don’t feel that there should be a lot of accounts sitting there but if you can use something like Ping that pushes all content to each account, in the end it will be beneficial.
Thanks for commenting and I’m glad you enjoyed the post.
Have a great Monday,
Alexis