YOURLOGO

Harnessing the Benefits of Social SEO & Personalised Search

Marcus TaylorHead of Social SEO at SEOptimise

@MarcusATaylor

YOURLOGO

How Facebook Likes Impact Rankings1

How Google +1s Impact Rankings

How to Succeed at Personalised Search3

I’ve split this presentation up into three parts:

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What I’m going to be talking about

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How Facebook Likes Impact Rankings

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What Google & Bing Say…

“We treat links shared on Facebook Fan Pages the same as we treat tweeted links.”

– Google, via Search Engine Land interview

“Google use Twitter, Google Reader, and other sites but currently do not use Facebook. So Facebook has no

real direct impact on rankings as of yet” – Barry Schwarz, SE Roundtable

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I ran two experiments

Likes used to get URLs indexed.

Now they don’t.

Likes = Traffic = Links & Other Social Signals = Rankings.

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But: Likes Do Still Impact Rankings Indirectly

How Google +1s Impact Rankings

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What Google Say…

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“Click +1 to publicly give something your stamp of approval. Your +1's can help friends, contacts, and others on the web find the best stuff when

they search.”- Google

“Google will study the clicks on +1 buttons as a signal that infleunces the rankings and

appearance of websites in search results”- Google

Existing Google +1 Experiments

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“+1 markings seem to have a positive effect on the number of impressions in search results because they rank higher when the same person re-visits the same search or rank higher results in the social circle of those who marked the link.

All in all, this increased visibility and CTR can raise traffic to a website’s substantially. We measured an increase of 20% with our limited experiment”

More info: http://www.seoeffect.com/images/the%20seo%20effect%20google%20%2B1%20button%20experiment.pdf

My Experiment

I took 36 URLs across 6 varied domains and added ‘real’ +1s

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More info: http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2011/08/experiment-do-google-1s-impact-your-rankings.html

• Mixture of indexed / unindexed.

• Mixture of homepages / deep pages.

• Mixture of pages with links / no links.

• Mixture of pages with social signals / no social signals.

The Results

I noticed (sustained) ranking increases within a few days in most instances.

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Google +1s Are a Ranking FactorThey’re also likely to become more of a ranking factor in the future.

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How to Succeed at Personalised Search

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You have to influence a user’s search historyIn favour of your brand or website.

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Several months later..

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Appear for ‘comparison’ and head of tail key terms where people start stopping.

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Be awesome and encourage return visits.

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Run offline (radio / TV / print) ads with a ‘search for us’ call to action.

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Run branded events / sponsor events.

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Link or reference search results from products – tell people to “search Google for X” if you know you rank #1 for that term.

Questions?

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@MarcusATaylor