Four ways to takeyour Search Marketingto a new level withSocial Media Monitoring

White Paper

LLEETT’’SS TTAALLKK::SSoocciiaall MMeeddiiaa RROOII

With Connie Bensen

The secret is to make it as easy as possible for search engines to find your site and the great content youhave created. How have you chosen the keywords that are being used for your search engine optimization(SEO) efforts? What were the reasons for your choices? Technology now offers the ability to gather thewords and phrases that consumers are using online when talking about your brand, industry andcompetitors. The advantage to using these words for SEO purposes is that these are the same type ofwords that people are using to search for your products and resources! The value is that your site has moretargeted visibility. Getting ranked is one thing, but it's even more effective to rank for the way that youraudience is looking for you.

Here is the process for using social media monitoring in SM2 to identify words that are optimal SEO keywords.

1. Set up searches for your brand, industry terms and competitors

2. Create Theme word clouds for each. A word cloud is the result of analyzing all the conversations. The words that are used most frequently are displayed as the largest words.

3. Author Tag clouds provide an overview of the words that people have chosen to use. They used these words to tag their content. Their goal in choosing these words was to attract the search engines, so they are ideal indicators of the topic that you searched for

All of the following examples are based on searches set up for: 'McCafe', 'Starbucks' and'iced coffee'

Example 1:

This is the Theme graph for the search results for 'McCafe'. A word cloud graph isgenerated by making the words that were used most frequently the largest. Words suchas chocolate, Free, mocha, mcd are SEO keyword ideas.

Four Ways to Take your Search Marketingto a New Level With Social Media Monitoring

© 2010 Alterian. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.

Drive better quality traffic to your website and lower the costs of your PPC campaigns

Executive Summary: Social Media Monitoring (SMM) can be a powerful supplementary tool to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for getting your web siteranked and found by your target audience. Every organization wants to better know their customer segments. Traditional market researchand focus groups can be expensive and time consuming. Social media monitoring now provides a cost effective method to gain an in-depthsense of what consumers want and need. This whitepaper outlines how you can utilize that information to make your website(s) and Pay PerClick (PPC) campaigns more effective.

You’ve invested in a web content management system so you have the right tool, and you’ll already have the industry knowledge forsuccess, but how do you harness this with effective, targeted copy to pull in your customers?

In the ‘traditional’ world of bricks and mortar businesses, you might have considered advertising or direct mail to drive traffic to your site.The good news is that in this digital age, it’s even easier to connect with your potential customers! They’re already searching for yourproducts and services even as you read this. But are they finding you?What if you could ensure that you’re using words and phrases thatthey’re searching for? What if you could know what words or phrases connect with your competitors?

What if you could knowwhat words or phrases connect with your competitors?

1. Social MediaMonitoring identifiesKeywords

(To create a Theme Graph in SM2 click on the Themes report in the left navigation. Click on New Graphand use the wizard to choose whether you'd like to use All Results or a specific search term. There is alsothe option to choose all dates or specific dates.)

The word clouds can serve three distinct purposes:

1. The word clouds associated around the industry terms are the most powerful because they allow you todescribe your product using the same language that consumers are.

2. The competitive words also provide additional suggestions for keywords. You want to make sure toincorporate these in the copy on the web page to improve the organic ranking for your site, then whensomeone is searching for that keyword they will in turn find your product.

3. The words people are frequently using around the brand are ideal to identify keywords to use asmetatags. This doesn't have an effect on Google, but is good for smaller search engines.

In the third case you are identifying industry related terms that people are searching for in the very earlystages of the buying process. These are valuable to attract consumers to your site inpreference to your competitors’ sites. An extension of this idea is to create microsites forspecific products and target audiences. This is helpful to avoid overwhelming visitors toyour site who are still in the exploratory stage. This same methodology can also identifykeywords for specific customer segments for campaigns that are directed to tailoredlanding pages.

The ROI (return on investment) is easy. Increased SEO means that more people who arespecifically interested in your product/resources will find your content. That in turn will

translate into higher revenue from sales and build brand awareness. An example would be to consider thatyou are Toyota. You don’t want to rank for “car” because you will be pulling people who might not be yourtarget consumer. You want people who are researching cars to find you. They will be using more specific

Four Ways to Take your Search Marketingto a New Level With Social Media Monitoring

© 2010 Alterian. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.

Drive better quality traffic to your website and lower the costs of your PPC campaigns

Increased SEO willtranslate into higherrevenue from sales andbuild brand awareness

terms than 'car'. So as Toyota you may want to make sure you are ranking for “safe and reliable SUVs, cars,trucks, etc” or even more specifically if you notice that your audience’s conversation is really positivearound the hybrids, you can make “hybrids” and “environment friendly vehicles” the main topic.

In addition to keyword research, a social media monitoring tool can also show what your keyword density ison your blog. Here is how: Enter the RSS feed from your blog as a custom source. The tool will analyze thecontent and the word cloud will show you the words that you are using the most frequently.

How much time do you invest in researching the content and sites that are relevant for you to create links?Search engines appreciate diversity in links and your audience appreciates relevance. A social mediamonitoring tool can help guarantee both. Hours can be invested researching websites, social medianetworks and bloggers who are writing about your niche. Then of course, there is also the challenge ofidentifying the sites with the most influence. Of course, building a relationship with these influential sitesthat ultimately leads to them linking to your own site will be in your favor as search engines value links fromother sites with relevant content. This is far more acceptable than paid linking strategies (which go againstsearch engine algorithms).

A Social Media Monitoring tool can help you find the most appropriate content with which to link andprovide a fast overview of their respective influence. This will help you to efficiently expand on your linkbuilding strategy.

Example 2:

The number of stars indicates the amount of influence that a site or social network has. The ability to sortby this aspect allows you to see the most influential sites. And you're able to see Full Details for each entrywhich provides additional sites to link to (see Example 5).

(Under View Results, click on Show More Options. Use the pull down menu next to Order by and choosePopularity.)

Four Ways to Take your Search Marketingto a New Level With Social Media Monitoring

© 2010 Alterian. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.

Drive better quality traffic to your website and lower the costs of your PPC campaigns

2. Social MediaMonitoring Supplementsyour Link BuildingStrategy

As stated earlier, social media monitoring will help identify keywords that consumers are using as well asthe sentiment around them. This information can guide you in efficiently identifying less expensivekeywords to bid on but that are just as effective. In addition, based on your research conducted through

social media monitoring, you can create landingpages for your ads with higher relevancy. This willautomatically result in lower costs per click, as theauction system used by for instance Google,analyses the landing page when determining theprice you need to pay for a click.

Social Media monitoring also takes geo-targetedcampaigns to a new level. Imagine if you were ableto identify the physical locations of thoseindividuals with whom you holding onlineconversations? For many of these onlineconversations it is now possible to identify thelocation of the content creator. Mapping thismetadata provides a powerful insight that can be

used for business decisions – for example it can be used to identify high densities of your consumers,where there might be opportunities for new markets and likewise where your competitors are located.

Example 3:

In the example, the most conversations in regard to 'McCafe' are occurring in Germany.

(To create this in SM2 click on Map Overlay in the left navigation. Filter to 'McCafe'.)

Four Ways to Take your Search Marketingto a New Level With Social Media Monitoring

© 2010 Alterian. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.

Drive better quality traffic to your website and lower the costs of your PPC campaigns

3. Social MediaMonitoring AugmentsPay Per ClickCampaigns

Search engines are continually changing their algorithms. The best SEO can be built organically byleveraging user generated content. The social web has evolved to the point where your consumers want tobe involved. Providing your visitors with the opportunity to interact and contribute content adds value forthem and builds trust. Integrating social media into your site will increase your inbound and outbound links.

Inbound links are golden! The trick is to optimize your content so that other websites, blogs and individualslink to your site. But what kind of information do they want and need? In what types of activities are theyinterested in participating? Monitoring online conversations provides answers to all of these. You can findout the interests, the needs of your customer segments and where they are conversing online. It will alsoindicate what types of media formats - such as voting, reviews, forums, video contests and more - in which

they prefer to participate. Keep in mind that different customer segments have differentneeds. Stay at home moms will want different functionality than career executives. Onceyou find the features that your consumers would like from your site you can experimentwith building them in to your new website. When you have people interacting at yoursite, and you’re participating at the sites and networks they’re involved in, they willnaturally start linking to your site in their conversations.

Example 4:

The Domains Report shows the online locations of the search results. Analyzing theseprovide many ideas. In this case it is surprising to see a number of links related to weightloss. This is a great opportunity for McDonald's to market McCafe to a specific customer

segment. They're already talking about the brand!

If you find out that people are generally confused about a certain aspect of your product, you can create aguide on your site that other people would want to link to for reference. In this case consumers mayappreciate nutritional information about McCafe products.

(In SM2 click on Domains in the left navigation)

Four Ways to Take your Search Marketingto a New Level With Social Media Monitoring

© 2010 Alterian. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.

Drive better quality traffic to your website and lower the costs of your PPC campaigns

Integrating socialmedia into your sitewill increase your in-bound and outboundlinks.

4. Social MediaMonitoring Buildsorganic SEO

Outbound linking is easier. This type of link building almost happens automatically. Your site should beoptimized for ‘shareability’. RSS distribution is one of the easiest ways to give your content legs by allowing

people to subscribe to share it. People who use RSS readers are generally those that areblogging and commenting, and will create future links for you. The RSS feed also makesit easy for you to syndicate your content on collaborative sites which will catch theattention of new audiences/markets.

It’s also invaluable to integrate channels that support specific media formats like YouTubefor videos, iTunes for music, Flickr for photos, SlideShare for presentations, etc into yoursite. They allow people to find your content through specialty search engines. Most of

these offer embedding options and encourage sharing of content. As noted earlier, choose the formatoptions that make sense for your customer segments.

The most obvious form of outbound linking is to link to influential sites and that have relevant content. InExample 2, you can find online communities that are talking about the brand, competitors and industrytopics. Once you identify the influential ones and the ones that are of specific interest to your onlineaudience, you can see the sites that they link to. These are the sites that they think are important and theyare most likely very relevant to their topic. They are ideal to link to and start building relationships withthem.

Four Ways to Take your Search Marketingto a New Level With Social Media Monitoring

© 2010 Alterian. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.

Drive better quality traffic to your website and lower the costs of your PPC campaigns

RSS distribution is oneof the easiest ways togive your content legs

Example 5:

In each search result you can see what sites that specific site is linking to.

(In View Results every search result has its own tool bar. This provides access to the 36 fields of metadata.Click on Full Details on the right. Then click on the Analysis tab to see the Links to Related Websites.)

A social media monitoring tool offers a multitude of opportunities to maximize your SEO efforts byleveraging the new opportunities that the social web offers. Your consumers are expressing themselvesonline and providing all of the key words and phrases that they’re searching for. Are you listening?Monitoring and analyzing those conversations will provide incredible insight and make your SEO efforts allthat much more effective.

Four Ways to Take your Search Marketingto a New Level With Social Media Monitoring

© 2010 Alterian. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.

Drive better quality traffic to your website and lower the costs of your PPC campaigns

Conclusion

Four Ways to Take your Search Marketingto a New Level With Social Media Monitoring

© 2010 Alterian. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.

Drive better quality traffic to your website and lower the costs of your PPC campaigns

About the “Let’sTalk” Series withConnie Bensen

Social Media marketing is providing a whole new dimension for brands to connect with consumers. Thesocial web is a vast entity and every marketer needs a tool to harness the information in the most costeffective and efficient manner. A social media monitoring tool offers the ability to maximize the digitalportion of your marketing budget in order to create, execute, measure and report on a social mediastrategy.

The Let's Talk Series, by Connie Bensen, is a series of 10 whitepapers describing the variety of ways thatmarketers can increase the ROI of their marketing efforts. Topics will include how to use a social mediamonitoring tool for SEO, Lead Generation, Social Media campaigns, Customer Service, CompetitiveInsight, Corporate marketing, PR and reputation management, etc.

Connie is the Director of Social Media and Community Strategy at Alterian, which provides leadingmarketing products for the enterprise. She is a key voice amongst online Community Managers. Her blog,www.conniebensen.com is recognized as a leading resource for cultivating online communities, providingbest practices for this emerging role and it is listed in Forbes.com as one of the 20 Best Marketing andSocial Media Blogs by Women.

Alterian’s SM2 is a social media monitoring and analysis solution designed for PR andMarketing professionals. SM2 helps you track conversations, review positive/negativesentiment for your brand, clients, competitors and partners across social media channelssuch as blogs, wikis, micro-blogs, social networks, video/photo sharing sites and real-timealerts.

Alterian (LSE: ALN) empowers organizations to create relevant, effective and engaging experiences withtheir audience that help build value and reinforce commitment to their brand, through the use of theAlterian Integrated Marketing Platform. Alterian drives the transformation of marketing andcommunications, making it practical and cost-effective for companies to orchestrate multichannelengagement with the individual.

Alterian’s unprecedented integration of analytics, content and execution through industry leading tools,such as the Dynamic Messenger email platform, SM2 Social Media Monitoring platform and the awardwinning Content Management solutions, enables companies to build integrated communication strategieswhich create a true picture of the individual.

Alterian works with marketing services partners, system integrators and agencies who recognize the needto plan and deliver coordinated customer engagement services in partnership with their clients. For moreinformation about Alterian, products within the Alterian Integrated Marketing Platform or Alterian’s PartnerNetwork, visit www.alterian.com or the Alterian blog at www.engagingtimes.com.

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