Getting Started with SEO, PPC and Social Media

Never mind the BAFTAs, the British Academy Awards or even the Oscars: the events to be at lately are clearly the advertising ones. The buzz words are ‘Social’ and ‘Search’ and not apart like relatives suffering from sibling rivalry but very much in tune and complimenting each other in a way identical twins are said to behave.

After a flurry of international discussions about this at Social Media Week last week, Fresh Business Thinking picked up the conversation at the ‘HIT ME, optimise your search’ event at Microsoft’s London Victoria offices yesterday. Cedric Chambaz, Microsoft UK, David White , Weboptimiser, Guy Levine , Return on Digital, Nick James, Fresh Business Thinking, John Straw, Lindex, Rob Shaw, Epiphany Solutions, Colm Bracken, Microsoft UK and Stephen Waddington, Speed Communications shared their knowledge with the SMB audience.

 From their conversations the top tips on PPC, Social Media, integration of the search & social and SEO:

On Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

1. Have a strategy & define your goals.
2. Have your site hosted on a dedicated server with a unique IP number which is based in the country you are operating in.
3. Use a high quality top level domain name.
4. Establish a strong linking structure within your website.
5. Establish social connections and have your site listed on the sites of organisations that are relevant to yours.
6. Research which keywords are important (PPC tools may help you here).
7. Get noticed and attract a crowd. Social media & community engagement can help you with this.
8. Build trust with search engines; relationships with trusted publishers such as newspapers help.
9. Write keywords in the titles of your articles; ensure there are keywords in it. Make sure your links contain keywords and describe images so that they can be found by search engines too.
10. Last but certainly not least: make sure you provide fresh content. It demonstrates authority, gets the attention of spiders & robots, each new page is a new entry point, is another page someone can link to.

 On Pay Per Click Search (PPC)

1. Start small with a small PPC campaign and be specific, have a strategy & monitor results.
2. Use targeted landing pages for the best conversion rates in PPC.
3. Keyword research. There are tools which help you find relevant keywords for your campaign, check out what your competitors do. Think of the whole buying cycle when putting your keyword list together.
4. Create attractive ad copy using your unique selling points.
5. Track your results to see how your campaign is doing and if it may need adjusting. All search engines offer easy to use tools to do this.
6. Five million unique users use Yahoo! and Bing alone, you can reach 23 million users through Yahoo! and Bing through one platform. Yahoo! and Bing audiences are 41% more likely to convert than average UK searchers and 47% more likely to buy than Google users worldwide. Give it a go.
7. Microsoft Advertising Intelligence is a free tool you can use for keyword research, demographic insights and much more.  

On Social Media 

1. Have a strategy, if you use both PPC and social media, ensure your strategies are aligned.
2. Establish a social user name and check whether it is available.
3. Engage with your audience and give them a reason to share.
4. Make someone in your business responsible for your social media, be it your blog, Twitter or Facebook. Keep the content fresh and the conversation flowing.
5. Talk about what you know and think about your style.
6. The best way to get your head around how various means of social media work is to start using them.
7. On Twitter: fully complete your profile, consider using Cotweet if more than one person in your business engages, Tweetdeck and Sobees  help you keep an eye on multiple topics at once.
8. Follow your target market and key influencers (but start slowly, following thousands of people and not being followed much yourself could give the impression there isn’t a lot of value in listening to you).

Social and Search Together 

1. ‘2011 will be the year of personal search’ A search engine will only understand so much about human intend. If there is a layer of social media results (recommendations from friends for example) over the search results, these results may be deemed more useful and reliable.
2. Correlate your search and social messages, there are huge benefits to be had from making these two work together. Read our blog post on the power of social & search for some examples.
3. Paid media may be needed to achieve ‘earned’ media.
4.  ‘Everything you do in the social sphere will appear in a search engine at some point. What happens in search can influence your social media.’ Ensure both paid for and otherwise owned media (such as your Facebook page, Twitter, Linked in account) look professional, a mix of a paid for and social presence can give a strong impression in the search results.

What do you think?  Have you seen success in your own efforts to increase exposure online?  Leave a comment below and let us know!

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