Every marketer knows that when it comes to getting their brand discovered online, organic search is critical.
Consumers operate in an ‘ad-blind’ world, where by and large they ignore any form of advertising that is thrust upon them. To illustrate, the average click-through rate of a banner ad is a paltry 0.1%. Rather, people prefer to stumble across brands (including their products and services) via search engines and social recommendation. And search in turn is evolving, paying far more credence to social signals such as tweets, pins, likes and +1s when determining visibility within search engine results. Essentially, a social signal is what happens when a consumer follows a call-to-action to share a brand’s content.
For those late adopters who consider the world of social media and content marketing to be a fluffy, hazy arena where success is measured by reporting stats within individual social networks…it’s time for a rethink. Social signals are measurable social sharing metrics. What’s more, the greater the number of social signals that a brand can drive and promote, the better their chances of appearing more prominently in organic search results.
A recent article written by Ben Straley and Thomas Kim of Rio SEO for (MAA) More About Advertising highlights the importance of so-called ‘dark social’ to effective online marketing. The term refers to those forms of shares that are traditionally trickier to measure, such as text messages, blog comment threads, instant messaging and lesser-known online forums.
According to Straley and Kim, ‘dark social’ accounts for around 90% of all sharing of content. And while brands have generally got to grips with identifying and driving standard social signals on the major social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Google+, these standard signals may only make up around 10% of the overall content sharing occurring at any time.
The crux of all of this is that marketing is now an increasingly social environment. There is no getting around the fact that brands are having to utilise novel strategies to attract their audience’s attention – and that social signals are becoming an essential component of any SEO programme. SEO and social content have to work together for any brand messaging to be discovered online.
What we are finding is that the most effective and economical way to be discovered by the relevant consumers via organic search is to create truly ‘shareable’ content. This is often easier said than done however, particularly where resources and/or time are scarce.
At BlogStar, we specialise in creating branded content that shines, then seeding it in the appropriate social channels to drive true engagement. To talk through how we can do this for your business to boost your organic search rankings, contact us on 0845 055 9264
Photo: Raj
