A recent blog post and case study by Econsultancy has brought social conversations into the search realm. The post outlines a case study undertaken by Econsultancy on Magners cider whereby it appeared that online conversations mentioning the brand drove the Magners.co.uk website up search engine rankings for both brand and generic key words. Econsultancy had optimised the new Magners web site but there were no back links to it yet as it was sitting at a new domain.
It seemed that social conversations may have played a factor and Econsultancy set up a test site for the theory and you can read about the full results here. These social conversations did not include hyperlinks but instead seemed to rely upon a strong connection between the brand and the keyword "cider" in online conversations, and between the website and social media platforms.
So, if this theory is true and Google is in fact including social conversations in its ranking factors, what effect will this have on SEO? Are social conversations the new "vote of confidence" along with the old fashioned link?
You could draw some comparisons between gaining links and having social conversations generated around your brand, but there are also some key differences.
1) Positive or Negative Conversations
It is debatable as to whether a link can ever be classed as a "bad link". Links which are included in link farms and other black hat SEO methods are technically bad, but a link is a link and each and every one has a certain amount of equity when it comes to the search engines. But what about sentiment? A link to your brand in a piece of copy which is talking about your brand negatively means the same in terms of link equity as a link which is in a piece of text which talks about your brand in a more positive light, sentiment isn’t really factored in. But how will social conversations rank in terms of sentiment? Will the mention of your brand in conjunction with relevant keywords be enough to drive your site up the search engines, regardless of sentiment? Or are the search engines likely to bring sentiment metrics into their algorithms? After all, the point of monitoring social conversation would surely be to measure how trustworthy and liked a brand is. The saying goes "all publicity is good publicity", will this be true when it comes to social conversations affecting search engine rankings?
2) Consistent Conversation
In terms of SEO, it is good to keep your web site fresh and up to date, and to have others linking to you regularly. By keeping your site fresh and by publishing relevant, timely and informative information on it you are likely to have people link to you naturally (a technique lovingly named "link baiting"). Alternatively you can link build via other methods such as negotiating links on other sites and blogs, or by submitting your site to good online directories. There is an element of control here, you can link build, you can make sure your site has a certain amount of backlinks every month. But how can you ensure your brand is consistently mentioned in social conversations? You could argue the method would be similar to link baiting, in that your brand will have to stay relevant and do or make things which people will naturally want to talk about. Alternatively, and importantly, you could engage in conversation with your audience and those who are interested in your brand. If you create conversations around your brand then you are gaining more mentions and also gaining the trust of your audience. Respond to queries, get people's opinions on your products or services and let them know what's going on with you as a business. Magners were lucky in that current affairs (the introduction of the cider tax) meant that their product was mentioned a lot in social conversations for a given period of time. But when these conversations stopped, their search engine rankings slid back down.
3) Competing for Keywords
This leads nicely to my third point. As with links and anchor text, you will be competing with other brands or organisations for similar keywords in social conversations. Whereas before you may have wanted "trainers" as your anchor text in your back links, and had to fight with other brands for this keyword, you now have to try and be THE mentioned brand with the word trainers. Not an easy task to undertake! In the case study by Econsultancy on Magners, it would have been interesting to see stats on how other cider brands performed in terms of social conversation mentions in conjunction with the key word "cider". Did they also see their search engine rankings improve? And what proportion of the conversation on the cider tax mentioned them in comparison to Magners? Magners had openly stated that they were going to keep their prices the same despite the new tax, which may have meant they got more mentions than other brands. So picking up on news in your industry and responding to it online and offline may be a way to generate conversation.
4) Paid conversation
My final point in this post regards paid search. Will social conversations be utilised in paid search methods? Initially I'd like to say no, online conversations and social media are all about organic relationships and so I do not think there can be a paid alternative which will be deemed as genuinely social. "Paid conversation" just doesn't work in my eyes, it's fake, and isn’t a real conversation; it would have an agenda with no natural flow and would be more likely to resemble a dialogue from an advert. This isn't to say that some paid alternative might evolve from online conversations, in fact it already has what with Facebook CPC and "Promoted Tweets" on Twitter. But I would question how much these can be regarded as "social".
There is plenty more to discuss on the subject of online conversations and social media within search engine results, and at the moment it may all still be hypothetical as no-one truly knows if or how Google or any of the other search engines are crawling them in their algorithms. It would be interesting to see any further case studies like the one which Econsultancy recently published, and others which use sentiment metrics to see if sentiment plays a part in how the search engines rank brands from online conversations. If conversations are really being used in search engine algorithms it could potentially have a dramatic effect on SEO practice, but at the moment we can only speculate as to how and how much. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on this, and if you know of any other interesting case studies please do post them below.
