An Interesting Case Study for Social Media Buzz, Blogging & SEO
Sep 22, 2016
Recently I had a conversation with a very smart client about blogging for search engine optimization (SEO). The best way to have success in attracting new clients through blogging and SEO isn't the traditional way that SEO blogs were done in the past with highly optimized content that is keyword dense. Don't get me wrong, a good blog post needs to be on target with keywords in it, but if you want to get it to rank, particularly in competitive categories, you need to get some buzz. I'll explain the buzz more in a bit.
The following is a good example of a blog post that ranks really well because it went viral:
Admittedly, I did not write this blog post for SEO. It came out of passion. It isn’t packed with keyword phrases and the like and it isn’t a step-by-step guide to SEO although it ranks really well for SEO. I was tired of hearing the same thing from a client and I wanted to vent. However, I think the passion came out to readers and it went viral because it connected with them and they felt the same way.
I actually have a better blog post about how to do SEO for concrete5, that ranks well, but not as high as the previous post:
It gets about the same amount of traffic too it, but if you search for ‘concrete5 SEO’ it is the “Rant” blog post that shows up on page #1 of Google because the post went viral on social media which boosted it in Google’s eyes.
The “Definitive Guide to Concrete5 SEO” article is probably the one that most users are searching for when searching for “Concrete5 SEO,” but since Google doesn’t know user intent they have to go off the signals they have so the Rant post comes up first. I actually got a new client just this last week off the Rant article. He stumbled upon it when doing some research and gave me a call.
Here is where the buzz factor comes into play for SEO. If I were a term life insurance agency and I wanted to be on page #1 of Google and I wrote a blog post about 'How much term life insurance do I need' it would be a challenge getting to page #1 on Google because there are thousands if not hundreds of thousands of pages on the internet that talk about that very subject. It would be a difficult nut to crack.
However, what if I wrote a blog post that was a "rant" about 'how much term life insurance do I need' but it wasn't completely oriented to consumers, but to life insurance agents that maybe had the same passion as myself on that topic and I posted it on social media with a link to the blog post? What if that post went viral because it connected to a passion that other agents had and they started sharing? All of the social shares that would be done by those agents is buzz. Those shares with the link back to the blog post are all high quality backlinks in Google's eyes and google would then rank it higher. Possibly on page #1. Then, what if I got all that buzz I changed the beginning of the blog post some to something that is a little more consumer friendly with a link to my money pages on the site so when consumers came to the page they found what they were looking for so I start driving quality traffic to my products from that blog post?
I think you see what I'm getting at. Sometimes going in through the front door isn't the best way to get rankings. Sometimes you have to go in through a side door to get the result you want. Let us know how we can help you with your rankings and SEO.
Category: Search Engine Optimization