Reinforcing the Importance of Social Media Presence in SEO/SEM (PPC) for New Brands and Product Launches
There is probably a lot of content out there detailing the importance of Social Media for SEO in recent years. However, I thought it would be good to provide some insights on the topic using a recent example I had direct experience with (and isn't confidential):
In launching my website over the past month or so it has turned more into a sandbox project where I can freely test ideas and observe both executional and strategic challenges commonly faced when launching a new brand or initiative.
There are many challenges smaller advertisers come across when launching any promotions or brand awareness initiatives via a new site or microsite. The biggest challenge can be lack of support from big platforms/vendors such as Google (including YouTube), Facebook, Yelp and others. It is important to recognize that if you don't spend enough money (At least $5k a month in Bing Ads, $10k a month in AdWords/Yelp and probably $25k a month in FB/Twitter) you generally aren't going to get much quality support from most vendors. This also applies sometimes even if you are a small subsidiary of a larger brand in my experience. Even for someone with my experience, there are many things I have to test and figure out on my own.
One caveat to note is I intentionally chose a unique name for my S-corp in the beginning, with the future intent of ensuring easy brand dominance from a web perspective. If the name of your company is Bob's Bakery, it is going to be really hard for you to rank high organically especially in certain regions. So the first step in absence of having brand equity and recognition of a Fortune 500 name is to come up with a unique or uncommon product name or something really specific. If you can't, there are ways to get around that but that topic is for another post.
Initially when you register your company there will generally be aggregators ranking very high on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) on your branded terms. These companies scrape data automatically from your state or local online registries that post all incorporations online as public record. However, in my experience it has been fairly easy to get past most of them. My domain is about one month old and my site went live approximately 12 days ago and I am generally in positions 3-4 already on some key branded variations.
The first step that helped expedite initially was immediately connecting to Google Search console (webmaster tools) and submitting my sitemap. It doesn't matter if your site is sparse, has barely any content and only consists of two pages. The quicker the bot scans your site, the faster your site will start showing up on the SERP in my experience. Doing this got my rankings from being on page 2 improving to page 1 positions 5-7. Something important to note here is that Google doesn't really publish official updates on this prominently to my knowledge, but not having your site crawled first could be disadvantageous if you want to launch ads in AdWords immediately and cost-effectively. This is because "Quality Score", a relevancy ranking which determines how much you pay for your Ads in part is determined by the SEO health of your website and the landing page you are driving to specifically. So if the crawler hasn't scanned your site it is possible the information it communicates to AdWords regarding what quality score you should have will be incomplete, resulting in a lower score and higher CPCs (Cost-per-Click). There have been many advertisers I've dealt with that have never connected to Search console to complete this step, and as a result probably paid inflated CPCs for the first 1-3 months or so (depends on the click volume of your keywords) until their account history and brand awareness got better traction. Larger advertisers may be able to afford paying this premium, but if you're a small business owner you'll probably want to be more careful about this nuance.
The second step which improved my organic ranking even further: Once I created my Twitter account and made my first tweet with the appropriate hashtags, as well as verifying my Facebook Business page (You have to upload a copy of your articles of incorporation to verify the page as a real business) my rank improved again within about 48 hours. This is the step that got me to Page 1 positions 3-4 on "Tenzo SEM" and "Tenzo SEM Corp" (still working on "Tenzo SEM Corporation", but it is lower priority as most searchers will prefer to type in the abbreviated version first). Keep in mind these results are not typical and it is important to note the name of my S-Corp is very unique, which has likely been a factor in the speed here. Nevertheless, for any company looking to promote a new site as quickly as possible, these are tips you should keep in mind moving forward to provide some much needed expediency and momentum behind a brand or product launch. Every little thing adds up. So in absence of some serious awareness generating paid media budgets in other channels such as Display, Video, Social and Native (along with Affiliate/Blogging/Sponsorships etc.) you'll want to cover these bases off as soon as possible.
Last but not least, was the difficulty in getting my Paid SEM Ads to show in Google AdWords. I had first encountered this issue earlier in my career where brands with virtually no awareness to speak of had non-existent search demand on their specific product or local brand terms they were trying to show up on. Basically what happens is when keywords you target have little to no history of search volume, your ads won't show generally. Although you buy Paid Search generally on a CPC basis, Google is not exactly in the habit of providing free brand awareness and impressions. Alphabet, Inc. (Google's parent company https://abc.xyz/) makes most of it's revenue from clicks from AdWords. They'll only tend to want to show ads if they think judging by user behavior, multiple people are going to click. (And please note as this is a common misconception: Repeatedly searching on your brand terms and clicking through your organic link from the same IP address will NOT help speed this process along) However, social signals have become very influential on SEO. This in turn benefits Paid SEM: Once I launched my Social Media accounts and the organic rankings were bolstered, my paid ads started to show on "Tenzo SEM" queries within about 24 hours. Unfortunately this is one of many tricks you will simply never learn talking to standard 1-800 number Google AdWords support. What they can help you with however, is making sure there is nothing wrong with your ads as far as their internal systems are concerned. The diagnostic tools available in AdWords which informs you of editorial approval status and other issues is usually accurate, but only 90% of the time.
The reason I launched Paid SEM in the first place is that it is a great stop gap measure until you can rank better organically on terms most important or profitable to you in the SERP. The importance of the synergy between all 3 is very evident in any successful business. They are usually dominant on Organic Search, Paid Search as well as Social (unless they just have extremely good word of mouth). Ultimately you can use Paid Search as well as Social to drive more traffic to your site which will then bolster your SEO (especially on branded keywords) over time in Google/Bing. There are many benefits of paid beyond that naturally, but even for smaller advertisers with a very small budget - It is worth the money to at least test. Ideally test at least 3 times with 3 different initiatives or themes you are promoting. This is particularly true if you are generating awareness about a new promotion or grand opening location and high volume of sales/traffic are required to "prove it out" in the market to your investors. What better way to get the word out than to people who are already in-market right now for your product or service? In addition, remember that advertising costs can be written off as a loss for your corporation taxes at the end of the year in most cases.
My site is currently very spartan right now content-wise. However, I will be blogging and tweeting more in the near future as time permits. For any specific Digital Marketing related questions please feel free to contact me at [email protected] and I will be happy to the answer them.
To learn more about SEM/PPC/Paid Search basics (3 different nicknames for the same thing) I encourage you to first visit: Search Engine Land - What is Paid Search?
Thanks for reading and I hope this was informative.