3 Steps to Social SEO for Your Boring-Ass Clients

Posted by RossTav

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Disclaimer: The following post is very long. If you do not like long blog posts then click here to read the one-line summary.

A big complaint I hear in the SEOmoz Q&A forums, and in the industry in general, is from SEOs that have clients that sell boring things that they believe cannot be adapted for Social SEO Campaigns. Those poor SEOs that are tasked with promoting key words like "buy door hinges online", "junk removal smallville" and "personal injury claims".

Well Boo Hoo! Get your head out the sand and get creative!

As an agency-side SEO analyst, I have found that the more boring the industry the more interesting the social campaigns can be. The following blog post describes the actions I have previously implemented to effectively promote a client in the personal injury claims space.

If you are not familiar with the industry the following statements may shine some light on what I was dealing with.

Hellishly Spammy: some of the links I seen would make a black hat pharma SEO wince.

Terrible Reputation: due to some unscrupulous firms, the industry was branded as "ambulance chasers".

Un-sharable Content: can you imagine sharing a link on Facebook for a Fatal Accident enquiry or Road Traffic Accident, then reading below Joe Bloggs "Likes" this.

So, how did I combat these issues?

Step 1: Produce Great Content

The title of Step 1 is slightly misleading; it really should say "Create Epic Content". I hate to say it, as it is rammed down our throats on every industry blog, but it is true. Nobody wants to hear a shitty marketing message; they want a real solid resource created by a real human.

When we were creating the content we wanted it to be as sharable, scalable and linkbaitable as possible. Therefore we decided to create an "ask the expert" daily video, where users could ask there question via an email or blog comment and we would get a solicitor to stand in front of a camera and answer the question. We used a Facebook comments plug-in for our blog to stop any spam and also to connect the questions with real people.

Side Note: having real people visible asking questions on your site via Facebook is a massive trust metric and can make very positive impacts on your conversion rate. Try putting a Facebook Like box somewhere on a sales page and watch conversions skyrocket!

Analyse the Response

Offering this service allowed us to really tap into the long tail keywords in this industry as we started to see patterns in the questions people were asking on our own site.

This meant that we able to answer peoples' questions directly and also able to create headlines for blog posts that were directly related to the searchers intent. Double Win!

As we started to look at the broad set of questions that were coming in and comparing them to the demographic data (thank you Facebook), we started to see trends appearing in the types of questions and the ages of the users. We were actually getting around 50% from students asking legal questions and 50% from potential clients asking about injury claims.

Create Context and Reach Out to Users

At the point when the claims company was starting to rant and rave about students taking the piss out of the service and not using it for its intended purpose I transformed the perceived pain into a business asset.

I knew the student users would never be customers, but I believed that they could be a vehicle for gaining:

• Lots of backlinks
• Lots of free content
• Lots of social shares of said content

Therefore, we created a competition where the students would win a fully paid summer job at the personal injury firm, based solely on the merits of their social network power.

In order to enter the contest you had to complete tasks at different stages, and then get your peer group to vote on your particular contribution via retweets and Facebook Shares in a similar style to the X Factor or American Idol. In order to give you an idea about the amount of work involved in this competition I will outline the processes.

Stage 1

Students were asked to write a blog post on topics picked by the firm* (free content for the win!). The blog posts would then be vetted and the top 20 would be put up on the main corporate blog. The students then had to get their friends to vote on their post by getting retweets and Facebook Shares on the post. (free online promotion for the win!)

*Actually picked by me after analysing the keywords we really wanted to rank for. Moo HaHa!

Stage 1.5

As this was happening we were busy creating relationships with industry bloggers, making up press releases and contacting the Universities to tell them that this was going on and offered them a press pack to help write about it. We got a bit crafty and put a keyword in the competition title and made sure that HTML versions of our promotion packs were available as well as plain text.

HOT TIP: Whenever you deal with Universities DO NOT email them. Pick up the phone and arrange meetings. Make the effort to go see them and they will happily accommodate you when you need links, etc.

Stage 2

The top five blog posts were then put into a final that involved creating a video of why they should win the competition. The finalist then had to get their friends to vote on them for a final time via their social networks.

Stage 2.5

As the videos were being voted on we went for round two with the bloggers and online newspapers. As we already created the relationship with the Universities, a simple phone call was all that was needed to get them to add new information to their websites. This time the concentration was on getting the Universities to promote their students by getting the wider student body involved in voting by getting faculty members to blog about it and putting it through their main PR centres, all creating lots of juicy links.

Stage 3

Announce the winner in the most dramatic possible fashion.

In retrospect, we really should have announced the winner and then had a winner's party or a ceremony to make a bigger deal out of the event. This would of allowed us to thank all of the people who blogged and tweeted about the competition and also would have solidified any relationships the firm had created during the course of the competition. It would have also given us some more clout with larger news centres and would have allowed for us to invite some news camera crews along thus, helping the companies offline reputation.

Step 2: Produce Great Content

Client: Ok let's face it. Nobody cares that I am selling door hinges at rock bottom prices. Or that I have invented a new way to recycle junk. Or that I have just started a partnership with a trade union.

Me: Correction. You customers don't care about that stuff. But people in your industry do. So why not use them to promote your content and get those retweets, shares and plus ones?

Client: Why would some other guy retweet/share/+1 my content?

Me: Because, not only are we going to create amazing content, we are going to become a news hub for the industry and allow other people to contribute to the site. We are going to share other peoples content in our social stream and we are going to talk to other content creators about what they are doing in the industry

Client: How long? How much? Why? What's the point? How will this make me more money?

Me: "Falcon Punch to the Head"

How It Was Done

Create a blog on your website on the premise that you are going to become an industry hub for information.

When we created the blog we got as much of the company involved as possible and asked for the strongest writers to be regular contributors so we would have a new piece of quality content going out every day. After the blog was created we started submitting it to a couple of aggregators (Technorati, etc.) and list websites. Also using Google’s advanced operators I searched for "top 10", "best of the year", "top 100" style lists for legal blogs and resources.

After pulling off this raw list of URLs from Google, I imported them into excel and stripped out any duplicates. I then used the SEOMoz API to pull in the MozRank and the number of backlinks to each domain. Using this data I sorted t