[00:01:06] Jonathan Greene: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome welcome welcome to Episode 3 of the SEO Domination podcast. Best thing in my whole week is saying domination like that. It’s getting ridiculous. But here we are dominating. My guest today is Jessica Nath. She’s the SEO social media guru in-house. Much social media ninjitsu happening under her purview. Now I’ve asked her to come on today and talk to me about social signals and how they affect SEO. What works and what doesn’t, what’s fact and what’s fiction, what’s myth and what’s legend, etc. There’s a lot of misinformation. People think they know things that they don’t know. So hopefully we can get some clarity on that today. How are you doing, Jessica?

[00:01:51] Jessica Nath: I’m doing good. I think I’m going to start telling people that I’m a social media ninja from here on out. I like that.

[00:01:58] JG: Ominous title conferred. Welcome to the social media ninjitsu community. Let’s take it down to a kindergarten level and give people a little bit of background on what we’re talking about, since we do get a mixed audience. When we’re talking about social signals. What are we talking about exactly?

[00:02:20] JN: Simply put, social media signals are a web page’s shares, likes, and overall social media visibility as seen or perceived by search engines.

[00:02:32] JG: Alright. So nothing terribly complicated happening there, it’s just basically all the information related to social stuff and how your content gets distributed and interacted with on social platforms. So nothing too out of the ordinary there, but I heard a dirty secret. It’s going through the grapevine. There’s a lot of [talk] going on in the background that social media signals don’t really affect your ratings. Why are people saying that?

[00:03:01] JN: Yeah. SEO and social media have a bit of a complicated relationship, and it honestly makes me feel like a bit of a paradox whenever I’m telling my clients that I’ll be working on their social media SEO strategy. Social media signals do not directly affect SEO rankings, which is something that just blew everybody’s mind when Matt Cutts — he’s a Google Webmaster — he announced this back in 2014. It really shocked a lot of people, but there are good reasons for it.

[00:03:35] JG: Mind blown.

[00:03:36] JN: Yeah. A lot of people going crazy. One reason he gave is that when Google is determining rankings, it sends out a crawlers and they’re going through your web pages, but they’re doing so within a finite period of time. So think of it as a snapshot — they’re taking a snapshot of your web page. That’s fine for blog posts or other pages on your web site that aren’t necessarily changing very frequently. But think about how frequently you change your social media. On a day to day basis or hourly basis, or for the real enthusiasts out there, that minute-by-minute basis, you’re changing your profile picture, you’re updating statuses, you are adding friends, deleting friends, etc. It’s in a constant state of change and that’s just kind of the nature of social media. Would it really be fair of Google to go through its crawlers and collect data on information that’s who knows how old? It really wouldn’t make sense to do so, but there’s also a little bit of a safety worry there. Cutts gave an example of a scary scenario that could be worse if Google went through and crawled social media pages. He said: imagine that maybe someone’s in an abusive relationship or something, and they go ahead and block the person who’s abusing them from social media. If Google sent out its crawlers before the person was blocked, then those two profiles will be linked which, of course, is not a good scenario. So if there’s anything we’ve learned within the last year or so, it’s how extremely important it is to protect your identity and your privacy on social media. Until you know we find a better way of doing so, Cutts said he doesn’t really see this being solved and social signals won’t be incorporated into the rankings algorithm.

[00:05:42] JG: Ok that makes sense to me, I suppose, but I’m also a person who pays attention and reads and looks at things. When I jump into my analytics and look at the articles that are performing well on my web site, and then I go look at the social signals, [I notice] those are the same articles. It appears as though there is at least a strong correlation. Is a correlation and not causation, or what’s going on there? How are those two things not directly related?

[00:06:11] JN: Yeah. There’s no one who wishes that there is a connection more than us SEO social media people, but I promise that this isn’t some kind of dirty secret we’re keeping in our back pocket to win the rankings. So, you got it. What it comes down to is mixing up correlation with causation. Say you put together a really wonderful piece of content and you see that it’s really gaining traction on social media. It’s getting likes, page clicks, reactions, and it’s also climbing Google’s ladder for rankings. They are not connected as much as we wish they were. But the reason that they’re gaining traction in both areas is because [of] the same reason: you have great content. People are really resonating with it. While people are sharing it on Facebook and whatnot, you also have content creators that are linking to it because they want your content on their web site, or maybe they’re mentioning your content [in a] study they’re publishing, or something like that. There’s that link juice that’s going on and that has nothing to do with social media. It’s just that you have great content, so give yourself a pat on the back. You’re doing great. But the two are not connected.

[00:07:32] JG: What the heck is “link juice” for the uninitiated?

[00:07:37] JN: Link juice is the connection between two web pages. If one web page links to another web page, that helps both of them with SEO.

[00:07:52] JG: We use that term, that colloquialism, around the shop a little bit.

[00:07:58] JN: We also use “linkerati”. That’s a new one. I like that.

[00:07:58] JG: They know who they are; we don’t need to explain it.

[00:08:04] JN: Oh yeah.

[00:08:06] JG: So as much as we wish they did, social media channels, shares, comments, reactions, etc, are really not contributing to SEO ranking, as it were. Okay, but — and I hate to keep disagreeing with you like a Negative Nancy. I’m not really; I’m just sort of prodding you. But we’re talking about Google for the most part. I mean, there is Bing, Yahoo, etc, but predominantly SEO is done for the Google platform, in most cases. What about Google Plus? Is that still even a thing? I think I had a profile once.

[00:08:45] JN: Yeah. It’s not the most popular of social media platforms, but it is still a thing, and it’s actually the only exception to all of the above. It’s an exception in a very targeted way. There are two scenarios where Google Plus will help you rank for keywords. The first one is if anyone adds you to their circle, [which is] their little group on Google Plus, then your posts will rank quickly for keywords. But this is only to those who add you to their circle. The second scenario is, imagine you have a friend that you put in your Google Plus circle and they “plus one”, which is like the equivalent of a Facebook like. Maybe they plus one a page about dog food or cat food, that page will rank higher if you search for dog food or cat food, but only if you are logged into Google and have personalized web search turned on. The ranking will actually show a little note underneath that saying that, “So and so plus one-d this piece of content.”.

[00:09:57] JG: Yeah, a lot of people I don’t think realize that if you’re logged in and connected, you actually get a customized search experience based on your preferences and proclivities to the extent that Google can track it. [Either way,] that’s slightly disappointing that overall, with the exception of Google Plus which is tumbleweeds for the most part, that social doesn’t really do much us from an SEO perspective. I guess that begs the question — you know don’t get angry, I ask everybody — but why do we keep you around? And why is social media still valuable in terms of SEO?

[00:10:38] JN: Well, first and foremost, I think you guys keep me around because I’m so charming and lovable, and I have a great appreciation for gifts.

[00:10:43] JG: Naturally, naturally.

[00:10:43] JN: Of course. But also for those social media, the signals don’t directly affect SEO, and I’ll probably say that about five more times during this interview. Social media is still really helpful for an SEO strategy. If you’ve worked in SEO for two days, or maybe you’ve read two articles about it, you’ll know how extremely important link building is to that whole process. Social media is a great vehicle to get your content in front of content creators, who will in turn link to your content and boost your rankings. At CanIRank, we put together something called a Content Amplification Process. What that is is just a super fancy name for a promotion plan. We map out our different audiences, but we also map out our amplifiers, and those amplifiers can be forums, roundups, or blogs — places we want to promote to. But they also include a lot of social groups, [such as] Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, SubReddits, and even handles for influencers on Twitter. Whenever we have a piece of content, we post that in the social groups and we get it in front of both an audience, because you know we want to get some traffic to the website [and] get traffic to that content, but we [also] want to get it in front of influencers. Influencers frequent SubReddits and Facebook groups, because they’re looking for sources for the articles that they’re writing and whatnot. Whenever we’re posting within those social media groups, we’re putting our content right in front of them. We’re giving them the content they so want to post about. We’re letting them know that we have someone [who] would be great to talk to. One good example we have of this is we have a client that works in construction management — they have construction management app — and they had this really, really wonderful piece of content they put together. They wanted us to promote it, so one way we did that was we went into a bunch of SubReddits and Facebook groups and we saw that there were a good amount of journalists that were asking for sources to speak to about construction technology. We knew we had someone, we knew we had a good angle, and we reached out to them and gave them our content and said, “What do you think about this? Is this something you want to write about? Is this something your readers will be interested in? We’d love to connect you with our clients or maybe do something else like a guest post or whatnot.” It was just a really good way to connect with people and we did make good connections. We found someone that was looking for someone within construction technology, and we built a bit of a relationship with them because they didn’t want to report on that, but they wanted to report on similar topics in the future. Now they know that they can come to us whenever they [want]. That brings me to my second point: social media is amazing for relationship building. When you have a new piece of content, you don’t want to start the promotion process at that point. You want to make sure that you have some really solid relationships built up. You want to know that they’re going to be interested in that content, and social media is just such a great way to do that.

[00:14:35] JG: Let’s segue right there for a second because I think that’s something that CanIRank is actually brilliant at doing. You guys are not just creating content and then letting it land where it may. You got a whole matrix for identifying where the holes in the market [are] for particular content verticals, and who are the people that are going to want to use this information. And so you’re not just producing content and then tweeting it out and hoping for the best. You actually have a coherent strategy to engage these people. Can you tell me anything more about how that works?

[00:15:14] JN: Yeah. That’s part of the content amplification plan. We map that out in a general sense as soon as we get to know our clients and what kind of content they will be producing. But we have a good sense of what content is coming out — either the clients telling us if they’re creating it or we have a wonderful content team. So when we know that that content is being created, we really go out and we search for who would be great to give this content to. Who is yearning this content? And at that point we work hard to build relationships with those people, and that way, once that content is out, we already know those people. They already know our name because we did things such as “like” their content, talk to them about their content, shared some of it, etc. We did everything we could to really build a genuine connection with them at that point. Now, whenever content comes out, they already know our name. We’re not just another name in their long list of emails or whatever. They’re so much more likely to go ahead and take a look at it and link to it if they like it.

[00:16:27] JG: So there’s a best practice, folks. If you’re not leading with competitive intelligence about what kind of information is already in the market and who’s ranking for what keywords and who’s paying attention to them, it might be something you want to start doing. Being a little more intentional about what you’re actually producing to begin with [helps] because then social media doesn’t become a crap shoot of dropping a link on Facebook and hoping that it works. It’s actually an engagement platform where you reach out to specific individuals with a targeted strategy. I think that the injection of quantifiable outcomes into social strategy is a gigantic quantum leap forward for what most social media managers are doing. I almost think that social media is what like outdoor advertising was two generations ago. You bought a whole bunch of billboards and just sort of hope for the best, right? It really wasn’t quantifiable. It was difficult to track in and quantify the revenue that’s coming from specific advertising initiatives. I think so many people approach social from that perspective today. For me personally, I’m learning right now. I’m sitting here learning from you, because that’s a much more measured, quantifiable, well-thought-out approach to how to utilize social for specific business outcomes, not just because we really like it when people like our articles. So it’s actually brilliant and CanIRank does that better than anybody that I’ve seen. But if you guys are listening to us and you’re interested in that, I’d love to have you ask follow up questions in a minute. Jessica, you sort of touched on this, but what’s the difference between a social media manager in a more traditional sense — I can’t we are saying that. Social media as an advertising discipline is not that old, and now we’re talking about “traditional social media” and how that’s evolved. But what’s the difference between a traditional social media manager and one that focuses on SEO?

[00:18:37] JN: Yes, so we frequently hear from new clients that we don’t really need to worry about social media. They have someone on their team who is doing well with maintaining the profile and posting nice, engaging content, and that’s wonderful. That’s super important for its own reasons. By doing that, you’re increasing traffic to your web site, you’re increasing brand loyalty, and of course increasing credibility, because I don’t trust many businesses that don’t have a social media presence these days. [However,] what we do is a little bit different. Social media with an SEO focus means that we’re connecting with, again, what our boss calls the “linkerati”. We’re leveraging social media to connect with our complementary business owners and influencers and bloggers and journalists. I have a good example of this. We had a client who was in the small pet product delivery space and we put together social media contest for them. In order to promote it, we went into print social media groups, Facebook groups, SubReddits and stuff like that, and posted about it. We saw a lot of people were really interested within this group, but even better, a lot of people were blogging based off of that promotion within those groups. So of course if somebody is blogging about your competition, they’re linking back to that page and they’re spreading the link love that we so yearn for. We actually even had a TV journalist who was kind of gauging the community discussion and they reached out to us to talk about what was happening. That’s pretty rare in this business and it’s really wonderful. In this case, content amplification brought the journalist to us instead of us seeking them out. It’s very important to have someone who’s doing a good job with your profile and putting together some good posts and building loyalty with your brand, but it’s also really important to have somebody who’s able to identify those link building opportunities and to effectively leverage them for link building.

[00:20:55] JG: And write accordingly. I found the sort of the efficacy of these social outreaches to bloggers and linkerati depends upon your ability to frame things in a way that they understand will benefit them and provide them with an impetus to take the information and use it. It’s very much an art form. It’s copywriting meets social media management meets active SEO outreach. It’s actually brilliant from a strategic standpoint to see it done in real time. It’s really compelling stuff. So, next question. It’s time to get down to the nitty gritty. Let’s say you made a believer out of me and I want to do some SEO social media promotional stuff. What do you got for me? Tips? Best practices? Hacks? Give it to me.

[00:21:40] JN: Yes. If you’re joining my social media ninja group, I definitely have some tips for you. The first one is be respectful whenever you’re posting in social media groups. I cannot stress this enough. It’s going to make everyone’s lives so much easier. Whenever you are promoting content, you don’t want to just dump it and run. You want to recognize yourself as a part of that community because that’s what you are. You don’t want to just be a marketer; you want to be someone who’s interested in that community, who’s taking part in it. When you have content that you know that that community will love, explain why they’ll love it. Maybe ask them a question about it. Maybe start a debate about it. There’s a lot of things that are very controversial, so it’s pretty easy to start a debate online. People love giving their opinions. But really, just make sure you’re not dumping the content and moving on with it. One example I have of how this worked out really nicely was we had a client who is in the entertainment space. They had a website where they were creating reviews and thoughtpieces based off of different television shows. They consistently wanted us to promote the content that they were producing. As the person who was working on social media for that client, I found very quickly that starting debates and approaching it in this way instead of just saying, “hey, look at this!” really got me so much further. One example I have of that was there was this one show called “Shadow Hunters” and they very frequently posted about Shadow Hunters. I was in a lot of groups about it and had to watch a lot of Shadow Hunters. And there was this weird love square in the show that caused a lot of friction and a lot of people were annoyed by it or just didn’t understand it. It was really strange. And so whenever I had content that was about that show, I really kind of tapped into that feeling and I made sure that I posted, saying, “What do you think about this? Is this something that’s annoying you? Are you getting whiplash because I’m getting whiplash. What do you want to see happen? etc”. I got hundreds of comments and reactions and people clicking through to it. So many people had opinions about this! It was great getting all of that just from one organic social post. You’ll find that if I had just been posted and said, “hey, look at this,” and moveed on with my day, then people would have just looked for second [and] probably wouldn’t have clicked on it. I could have gotten banned from the group because people are really finicky about that — they don’t marketers in their group. But because I recognized myself as a part of that community and engaged with everybody, I got so much further.

[00:24:52] JG: All the world hates a marketer. Nobody likes to let us in their groups anymore.

[00:25:11] JN: Yeah, they are not fond of you invading their groups. And I wouldn’t be, either, if I’m being completely honest. That’s something that people really tap into for finding connections and having a good time, so they [don’t] want people just dumping spam on them. I will say the same goes for whenever you are getting posts out in front of influencers, journalists, and bloggers. You really need to be respectful of their time. If you just send something their way and telling to look at it, they’re not going to look at it. They have literally e-mails filled with people telling them to look at stuff and do things. They barely have any time as it is. They probably have less patience, understandably so. So if you just asked them to look at something, they’re going to just shake their head and move on with their day. But if you’re respectful about it, you reach out to them and maybe bring up a post that day they wrote before and talk about how it connects with what you’re trying to promote, or maybe talk about how it disputes what you’re posting, [you can] make them understand why they should invest their time in reading your post and connecting with you at all. They have very limited time. You don’t want to waste their time. My last example is we have a client that’s in the small e-commerce DIY niche, which is huge. They wrote this really wonderful blog post that we wanted to promote it. We did so of course through social media, and one of the things we did was we tagged prevalent journalists — well, bloggers more so than journalists, but some journalists.

[00:27:07] JG: Hard to tell where the line is nowadays.

[00:27:10] JN: Sometimes! We tagged them and ask them questions. “What do you think about this technique? Is this something that you’ve tried before? Is this something that your readers ask you about?” Just really trying to start a conversation with them instead of just pushing it at them and moving on with their day. People really resonate with it and we even had one prevalent blogger reach out to us and say, “hey, this is really cool. I’d really love to do a project on this. Can I do like a product review for you?” Which was amazing because you love it whenever they come to you instead of you always being the person that’s poking at them.

[00:27:47] JG: That’s really great. Essentially what I’m getting here is that you’re taking a strategic approach to syndicating content — and even producing content and reverse engineering that process from the result all the way to the initial task. It’s like taking a scalpel in there and doing social media activities instead of — I don’t know what the alternative would be. Maybe a gorilla in a wading pool smashing around. It’s just being precise and being strategic, which, look, a lot of you guys are not being strategic with your social media efforts. I know because I read your pages and stuff. So, Jessica Nath, amazing advice. Wonderful takeaways and thank you very much. I want to take a few more minutes of your time and open up the floor for some questions if we can. So if you guys are still on here and you have anything to ask, we’d love to hear. Did you see that comment from Alison? I’ll show it again. She said, “The social media ninja herself.”.

[00:28:49] JN: I’m really digging this aestheitc. This is going on my LinkedIn.

[00:28:50] JG: Alison, we probably owe you a coffee for that. Any other questions? We’ll stand by. Sometimes they lag just a second, so we’ll just give it a few minutes here.

[00:29:04] JN: Yeah, no problem.

[00:29:04] JG: Those are some really great actionable examples actually of how to take this to the next level. I get the feeling that people are going to be scribbling this down and will try to revisit it, and reverse engineer how you’re doing it and planning it, which is one way to go about it. Fair enough. There’s kind of a learning curve that way, so I guess if people wanted to — listen, SEO is a thing. Here’s the problem. People who rely on paid traffic, when you turn that traffic off, the benefit stops with it. When you’re building things from an SEO perspective, it continues working while you’re not working. Now when a lot of people are looking for that “work smarter, not harder” payoff, it keeps working while they’re out fishing. SEO is definitely it. If you don’t understand the value of it, I’m telling you it’s valuable. If you do understand the value of it and you’re not quite in a place where you have the time to devote to it or the manpower, it might be worth reaching out and talking to the people at CanIRank and getting some advice. I am not an SEO person by trade. I’m more of a demand generation marketer and, I’m telling you, these kids are brilliant and the strategy of what they’re doing is second to none.

[00:30:19] JG: Let’s see. We got a couple of questions here. Oh jeez. I missed like three or four of them. Here we go. Mike Sims: “How do you decide which social platforms are best for your specific business?” That’s the quintessential social media question. “And is it necessary to promote on all of them or better to really focus on a specific few?”.

[00:30:40] JN: Yeah, that’s a great question. Good job Mike. Whenever you’re deciding which social platforms are best for your business, you really just need to take a deep dive into your business. You need to think about where the people that you’re trying to reach are going to be spending their time. For example, we have an outdoors client. They provide products for people that are hiking and whatnot. So with that client, I really want to focus more so in Facebook groups. There’s not going to be a lot of LinkedIn groups for people that are really into the outdoors. [I would] just really try to focus on your audience and who you’re trying to reach, and think about where they’re going to be hanging out, and just go hang out with them. I mean, you don’t want to keep searching.

[00:31:39] JG: Yeah. Totally makes sense. I actually wrote a book, believe or not, it’s called “Facebook is a Pub Crawl” and the whole core metaphor of the book was that you’re trying to hard with the social media stuff. Just pretend like you’re hanging out and making friends and then stop spamming people with product information until you’re friends with them. Be a helpful, friendly human and then we’ll worry about promotion when people are interested in you. It’s kind of the same thing. Where do your people hang out? That’s kind of where you want to go.

[00:32:09] JN: Exactly. Yeah.

[00:32:12] JG: Alison had a question as well. Her question is: “Do you find the changing algorithms on Facebook and Instagram specifically impact social SEO work?”.

[00:32:23] JN: That’s a really good question. For those who don’t know, the algorithms are really trying to focus more so on building up interactions between people. I guess Facebook realized that it was just kind of being overwhelming and it wanted to be a place that was a little bit better about connecting with friends and family. While that will affect organic reach for posts, that won’t affect SEO because we’re not aiming to get our posts that we’re putting on our own profiles to get into people’s newsfeeds. That’s important — that’s a very important social media strategy, but it’s not really important for SEO because what we’re doing is we’re trying to build connections ourselves. We’re not trying to get our post to go higher in the feeds, or to show up in people’s feeds. Whenever we’re posting in social media groups and connecting with people, that’s not going to be affected by the algorithm. It’s just going to go straight into the [groups] as long as the moderators accept them. While it’s really scary for a lot of marketers in the social media space, it won’t really affect your SEO efforts.

[00:33:46] JG: Fair enough. So Andrew had another great question, actually — well, this is Andrew’s first question. He said: “You mentioned the importance of strategy, but it can be really obvious when brands are being strategic in their social presence. How do you balance strategy and authenticity?” I really like this question because this is a problem for a lot of people.

[00:34:05] JN: Yes, yes. I love that question. I just try to be as authentic as possible. Well, I don’t try, but it’s really enjoy what you’re doing to the best of your ability, and you’ll just kind of find that you’re being authentic. It won’t be that you’re marketing to people; you’re entering these social media groups as a part of the community. You have a good gauge of what’s going on, the discussions that are happening, the debates that are happening and disagreements and [whatnot], and you’re able to really tap into that personality [and] the things that are going on there. Just really pay attention to what is going on there and bring that into your copy, bring that into you sharing your content. I cannot stress this enough: do not post something and tell people to “check it out” because you will unleash so many trolls on yourself and it will be so miserable for you. It feels like an invasion. Just be genuine. Just be a part of that conversation. Pay attention to what’s happening.

[00:35:13] JG: I’ve always thought of this as almost like a banking transaction. So whenever I’m going to post something to a social channel, the first question, regardless of whether it checks all the boxes and all the matrices in the world for hitting points of the market and in points of the conversation that have not yet been leveraged, the number one question that I always ask is: Is this content useful to the people who are going to read and engage with it? It must also have promotional value or else it’s not really worth doing. But is it useful for them? And then I think about, like I said, the bank. So every time I ask something of a social media audience, in terms of a call-to-action or something that I would like for them to do, that’s a withdrawal from the bank. So my job as a social media manager then becomes to drop coins in the piggy bank every single day, and fill that piggy bank with goodwill and usefulness [to] build relationships and nurture [them], so when I need to make a withdrawal, there’s money in the bank to pull from. I think that people unbalance with too much product launching and too much product benefit communication and all those things. They forget to be useful, which is really, really important distinction, and not really a complicated one. I think people overcomplicate social media management to a great extent because [of] exactly sentiments and questions like that when they just overthink it. It’s pretty simple. Are you being helpful and how frequently are you being helpful? Pretty easy to maintain the balance if you think of it that way.

[00:36:48] JN: And to add on to that — I love that example that you gave. I also find it really helpful and really kind of fun to interact with other people’s content within those social media groups, instead of just constantly posting your own stuff. Go through and read some of what’s going on. Comment on things. Be a part of the debate and the discussion. People will really recognize you as part of the community instead of being a marketer who’s invading their fun little space.

[00:37:18] JG: Yeah. In that book I told you about that I wrote, the core example I used was that if you and I were on a pub crawl and we were at a bar, and we were having a conversation about how our week went and you were telling me about you know the woes that you’re having with your boyfriend or whatever. Then if I was like, I so understand you, and this guy comes up and plops down in between us and slams a suitcase down on the on the counter and opens the briefcase, and inside there are shoes. And he’s right in between us at the bar with these shoes, and he’s like, “these are the shoes ever made.”.

[00:37:51] JN: Yeah.

[00:37:51] JG: Do you know that that I don’t care if they’re the best shoes ever? They may in fact be the best shoes ever made, but you just essentially wedged yourself into an ongoing conversation between the two of us and not really provided any value. You don’t really know me and you don’t really have my permission to interject in that way. I think that’s probably the best way to approach social. Approach so that when it’s time to talk about shoes, you’ll be welcome to do so, because you’re one of the group, you’re one of us. You know you cared about us and communicated with us enough that we sort of recognize you as one of the people, you know what I mean? A core metaphor, as it were. All right. Any more questions? Let me see. We got one from Erbe. It says: “How can social media and SEO boost conversations both individually and as a shared strategy?”.

[00:38:47] JN: Individually, [with] social media, you just really want to make sure that your content is connecting with people. And again, you need to be authentic with what you’re promoting. The name of the game is to get people onto your website so that they click through and they start recognizing that you’re thoughtleaders, that you’re someone who can be trusted, as an extension of that, your product can be trusted. That’s really what you want to concentrate on.

[00:39:27] JG: Social media is sort of an amplifier, isn’t it? A bullhorn for whatever you produce that’s useful and valuable.

[00:39:35] JN: Exactly. And then as a shared strategy, it’s kind of the same. You’re using social media as a way to connect with people and get them to link to your website, and whenever you’re doing that, that link juice is sending you up Google’s ladder. People are more likely to see you for the keywords that they’re searching for, whenever they’re looking for products and services related to your business. They work together to get you in that right direction, [and] get you to the top of the list. People are going to click on you way more if you’re on that first page on Google instead of on the second, third, or fourth page.

[00:40:23] JG: Yeah. I think what he’s asking is how does [social media] boost conversions [and] SEO, how does that boost conversions, and how do they do it together. Yeah, what you said is essentially right. Social media can boost conversions because it’s another platform, another space, in which your customers exist. They’re in a conversational mood and if you can say in theory the right thoughts and feelings to them, they’ll respond to that. SEO boosts conversions because it puts traffic on your website that you have not paid for. So it not only boosts your conversions, it typically boosts your ROI — increases your return on marketing efforts. Then, as a shared strategy, obviously social media adds power to SEO. So yeah, they kind of are inseparable in some ways, if you want to do it well. All right, any more questions? Any more questions for Jessica, our native social media guru? It’s been a fantastic conversation. Thanks for being with us.

[00:41:30] JN: No problem.

[00:41:31] JG: Really insightful stuff. All right, ladies and gentlemen thank you very much for joining us. Jessica, thanks for being with us. Anyway, great time talking to you. I can’t wait to have you back on and discuss this a little further in the future, because the whole thing continues to evolve. Everything that’s happening on social platforms right now is evolving, so obviously how we use it and how we engage with it is evolving as well. I suspect in a few months we’re going to have to have you back because things will be completely different than they are right now.

[00:42:18] JN: Oh yeah, the whole social media world does not like to stop at any point.

[00:42:21] JG: Yeah, I’ve always found that if I take a few weeks off from it, it’s almost like starting over. I’ll come and there’ll be 5000 new management tools and 200 new formats for content that I hadn’t thought of. You can’t rest on it. You can’t sleep on it. So again, thanks for being an expert. Thanks for sharing with us. Thanks for being here. It’s been really fantastic.

[00:42:44] JN: It’s been a lot of fun. Thank you for having me.

[00:42:46] JG: All right guys. This is the SEO Domination Podcast Episode 3. I’m with Jessica Nath. Thanks for joining us. Grumpy Cat says what’s up. Everybody have a great weekend!

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