A Social Media Manager’s View on SEO. First, Google what you think you should be ranking on. I did a search on “Facebook dollar a day” just now and was happy to see our articles in the first two organic results. That’s because SEO (getting rankings in search results) is the result of strong content marketing, not some activity you do. Here is a snapshot from our Google Search Console (used to be called Webmaster Tools), which should be part of your Google Analytics: While the “dollar a day” tactic is something that I happen to think is important, it’s not in the top 50 things that people are searching for where we show up in Google. Here we are ranked No. We could even update this article with quotes from other people that are authoritative–not just to send a stronger signal to Google, but to make a better article that deserves to rank for this search. Simply sharing it on various channels, perhaps with a boost, will increase awareness, more people reading the content, more people linking to your content (if it’s worthy), and better search-engine rankings. And the person whose job is to do SEO should be producing great content for you and other webmasters, which helps your social results. SEO, public relations, social media marketing, content marketing and word of mouth are increasingly becoming the same discipline.
If you’re a social media manager, you may see the world of
search-engine optimization as arcane
Google trickery mixed with
quasi-technical babblings.
Allow me to show you how to make Google and the various folks
who do SEO your buddies.
First, Google what you think you should be ranking on.
I did a search on “Facebook dollar a day” just now
and was happy to see our articles in the first two organic results.
There is one ad ahead of us, and one of the folks that we taught
how to do Facebook ads is the third organic result.
Incidentally, if you want to see search results that are not
biased by your search activity, make sure you add “pws=0” to your
query string, which means “personalized web search” is off. The
geeks out there will also note that even if you simulate logged-out
search results, Google is still personalizing based on your
location and user agent.
Oddly, we didn’t intentionally try to “SEO” for this or any
other key phrases. That’s because SEO (getting rankings in search
results) is the result of strong content marketing, not some
activity you do.
Some people might say this is a competitive search because there
are 187 million pages chasing this query (see first screenshot).
And the SEO smarties will say that using the in-title tool yields a
more accurate competitive set of 8.5 million (still a lot):
Back in 2007, we ranked No. 2 on Google organically for
“Facebook ads.”
And while that might sound good, what actually happened is that
I got overwhelmed with tons of random requests for
consulting–mostly unqualified.
We had no lead magnets or filtering process, so I ended up doing
a lot of free consulting to find out which leads were serious. So I
learned the hard way that rankings are less important than driving
high-quality traffic.
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