Employing someone for social media..... Is it worth it?

[Rockpapercopy_biz]

In my experience Twitter has proved to be the best to drive traffic and improve ranking. Google+ activity is widely known to be taken into consideration by Google, so it's worth making it work for you. Build a rapport with other users, the more popular your posts are [you get likes and re-tweets], the more likely Google will treat your profile [and associated with it website] as an authority in your niche. Be mentioned by a guru in your particular field and your ranking can improve overnight. Just a tip of the iceberg

 

[justinaldridge]

In my experience Twitter has proved to be the best to drive traffic and improve ranking.

that would make the most sense as Google has access to twitter data but not Facebook. We know Bing does take into account Facebook data in their search algo.

I haven't seen any correlation between twitter activities and rankings but as I am constantly doing SEO on my websites I would never see it.

I do have a site that I built about 18 months ago that I've done no link building for. I've been testing the effects of a growing youtube channel that is linked to this website to see if the increasing views and subscribers has an impact on rankings. Over the last year nothing...

I still haven't had any real ranking benefits from any SM activities on any of my sites.

 

[Rockpapercopy_biz]

Not all SMM activity is equal. As you mention, you specialize in SEO - I could tell you I tried SEO once and it didn't work for me - should I start telling everyone it doesn't work, and everyone should stop doing it? No, posting on Twitter once in a while won't give you the results you are after, but the key to success is to know what you are doing. If you want to see the results, you should employ someone who specializes in this particular field, know how to design images to catch the eye, how to research hashtags to bring the traffic, how to use CTA to attract the likes and re-tweets etc. Also how to interact with others who already earned a rank in your niche, to get shout outs, likes and build your profiles authority.

 

[UKSBD]

SMM is all about cliques, sucking up, befriending, name dropping, flattering others (and I don't mean that in a negative way)

Get in the right cliques, be active and provide occasional useful/informative/interesting/appealing content and Boom

If you think SMM doesn't improve rankings your definition of SMM is different to mine.

My definition of SMM isn't just about putting badges on pages, sharing content, having twitter accounts and facebook pages, it's about how socially active you are, who you interact with and where you interact.

Unfortunately, I'm the most unsocial person you could meet

Edit: Actually, what I just wrote there pretty much sums up SEO too.

 

[Rockpapercopy_biz]

Get in the right cliques, be active and provide occasional useful/informative/interesting/appealing content and Boom

If you think SMM doesn't improve rankings your definition of SMM is different to mine

pretty much, and nothing wrong with that

Edit: Actually, what I just wrote there pretty much sums up SEO too

thank you, pretty much proves my point. I am not a social person either, but as long as you treat it as a dialog and not a monologue [posting only about yourself / your brand], you're on the right track

 

[GeoMal]

Any type of advertising that brings traffic to your website, improves your rank.

Utter nonsense.

 

[boring-friday]

well... because Google controls 94% of the search results

Don't think they do but that wasn't my point was it? My point was why would they want you to know how to rank first? They also make it much much easier for blackhats to exploit if they tell people.
Have fun in Thailand though, I'd be doing the 'digital nomad thing' if my job was solely online like yours.

I don't even know why these discussions are a thing when its so easy to test. Find a medium comp keyword that you rank on the 7th page with just on page seo or something then try it. Send a million fake fb likes/shares and let me know how it goes, try buying 10 shoutouts from huge accounts and let me know how it goes.

I tried it 6 months ago and it didn't move

 

[CyberHour.com]

Having Social Media Manager is a MUST HAVE for small & medium business.
Social Networks are something you can't just ignore if you want to make more sales.
However you should hire someone who knows how to do engaging posts & advertising.

No, all I just said is posting on SM sites won't help your ranking.

Maybe before 5 years .. but today Social Signals are one of the top 10 parameters used by Google and they do had announce that before a year.

It is known that Google still follow, track and count "no-follow" links. And you DO need a balanced amount of DO-follow and NO-follow links.

 

[boring-friday]

Having Social Media Manager is a MUST HAVE for small & medium business.
Social Networks are something you can't just ignore if you want to make more sales.
However you should hire someone who knows how to do engaging posts & advertising.



Maybe before 5 years .. but today Social Signals are one of the top 10 parameters used by Google and they do had announce that before a year.

It is known that Google still follow, track and count "no-follow" links. And you DO need a balanced amount of DO-follow and NO-follow links.

I'd agree with both of those points if social media 'managers' were free but they aren't so its nonsense, social media won't be profitable for a lot of niches, not until they have 10s of 1000s of followers anyway.

And lol they might even be one of the top 10 but unfortunately on site seo and links are the top 2 and account for 90%+ of ranking in google

 

[CyberHour.com]

Well you could hire someone on part-time actually. Which won't be so costly at all. And of course it could be a freelancer .

Again, you still need balance between do and no follow links profile . Having only DO follow links soon or later will lead to ban from the big G

 

[boring-friday]

Well you could hire someone on part-time actually. Which won't be so costly at all. And of course it could be a freelancer .

Again, you still need balance between do and no follow links profile . Having only DO follow links soon or later will lead to ban from the big G

Makes no odds if you hire someone cheap or expensive, people just want a profit. Start ups especially need sales to grow not 'brand awareness'. You won't be getting good sales from social media as a start up in 80-90% of niches

No idea what that has to do with anything, I have loads of no follow links, I'm a google uncertified blog comment pro

 

[Scott-Copywriter]

It is known that Google still follow, track and count "no-follow" links. And you DO need a balanced amount of DO-follow and NO-follow links.

I've thought this for a while myself.

Google have really been quite clever about it all. They push the concept of no-follow links, but still factor them in, and then rely on website owners to make it glaringly obvious that they're carrying out unnatural link building campaigns by targeting do-follow only.

It's a handy self-regulating system (unless you're aware of it, of course). A natural looking portfolio of links will always have a mixture of both - perhaps even edging more towards no-follow than do-follow considering the amount of websites implementing no-follow control.

 

[Breaking Good]

SEO and SMM etc are red herrings sometimes. The OP needs to look at it from a business perspective, i.e what will work out most profitable. Every decision you make needs to be based around making your business more profitable.

The only two ways you can get social media to add revenue are:

a) sales from social media traffic
b) suggested SEO benefits (debatable as per the discussions on this thread where there are conflicting views)

with a) it really depends on your niche. Clothing brands and Instagram will work better than a steel bar manufacturer on Twitter. If you have unlimited time and unlimited resources, you will generate sales. But you don't have unlimited time and unlimited resources, so the argument is always "but it works" and the other side say "no it doesn't, it's a waste of time" But the real answer is probably more like....it will work but do you have enough time and resources to make it work or could your time and money be better spent elsewhere?

We've had sales from social media traffic in the past but we don't use social media much because it's just not the best use of our time. Some businesses rely on social media and that's great for them but it's about working out what will work for your business. Not everything works for everyone.

with b) - You have to ask yourself...IF social media is a significant enough ranking factor to warrant this kind of discussion then what is more valuable:

1. Hiring someone to control social media in order to gain an SEO benefit
2. Hiring an on page SEO/ linkbuilder in order to gain an SEO benefit.

In my opinion, if SEO benefit is my goal then my money would be better spent on option 2 (provided you select the right SEO of course).

So I guess what I'm saying is don't get too caught up in what Google or Matt Cutts are telling you and just work out what would be the most profitable route for your business. If you want to use social media to better your SEO, you may be better off hiring an SEO. If you want to use social media to generate sales, you may be better using other means. Unless your product and industry is perfect for social media.

If you want to use social media to just talk to your followers and send out news etc then maybe using a tool like Hootsuite to help you would be more cost effective than hiring someone.

 

[Shopclicks]

Google have really been quite clever about it all. They push the concept of no-follow links, but still factor them in, and then rely on website owners to make it glaringly obvious that they're carrying out unnatural link building campaigns by targeting do-follow only.

Sorry, but that's a flawed concept and one that Google shouldn't and wouldn't adopt. Giving credence to no-follow over do-follow? In fact they are doing the exact opposite by discouraging the use of do-follow links from paid for posts by bloggers. The same goes for any source of links that can be easily manipulated. It's the same reason you don't get a ranking boost by running an Adwords campaign, you just get more visitors.

Why on earth would Google be interested in how many people like, share, follow a link, etc. from a social media page? It's really very easy to get popular (and by popular I mean 1000's of likes on every post) on SM if you're prepared to pay and you have something people are interested in buying. Why would Google want you to pay Facebook for advertising instead of paying Google? Does a post offering 50% off Red Widgets for the next three days, make your Red Widgets page more relevant in a Google search for 'red widgets'? Of course it doesn't. Your boost in visitors is only going to last as long as the paid ad runs. And if you're paying Facebook, you're probably not paying Google.

Take a look at the example I posted earlier in this thread. Over 2 million SM regulars love that website and use it. Sales are through the roof. Did they get any sort of ranking boost from all those visitors? No they didn't. For at least 2 years that I know of, their category pages sat between page 6 & 10. It wasn't until they recently made their pages relevant the search terms that they now have better (but not good) ranking.

 

[Scott-Copywriter]

Sorry, but that's a flawed concept and one that Google shouldn't and wouldn't adopt. Giving credence to no-follow over do-follow? In fact they are doing the exact opposite by discouraging the use of do-follow links from paid for posts by bloggers. The same goes for any source of links that can be easily manipulated. It's the same reason you don't get a ranking boost by running an Adwords campaign, you just get more visitors.

It's a very effective concept.

Google does not like people manipulating backlinks. It goes against the whole point of factoring in backlinks, which is to help Google identify relevancy, quality and authority by how much the website is naturally shared around the web.

If Google really ignored no-follow links, then it makes their life considerably more difficult, as it restricts the factors they can use to determine how a page should rank. What would they do if every website on the internet was no-follow? No-follow in itself is a form of manipulation which disrupts the natural environment of links.

No-follow links might not pass on the same juice, and might be interpreted differently, but they won't be ignored.

My point regarding Google valuing no-follow links more is not to do with the "power" of those links. It's to do with how natural a website's links look. Through spidering, Google will know quite well what the average percentage of websites on the net is which allow do-follow compared to no-follow. I'm sure they've also segmented that data heavily depending on the type and topic.

This means that if they look at a site, and 90% of the links to it are do-follow due to artificial link building, then it's a strong indicator that the backlinks are not natural and should be weighted down as they are not a natural indicator of the quality, relevancy and authority of a web page.

However, if there's a more even balance, which is to be expected due to the sheer number of websites using no-follow these days to combat spam, then it's a good indicator that the link profile is natural and genuine.

My suggestion that it should edge more towards no-follow than do-follow is purely because I suspect that there's a higher percentage of no-follow websites on the web these days, especially with forums and blogs factored in, than there are do-follow. This means that a more natural looking link profile will have a statistically similar trend.

Google will never tell us this, of course. They rely on the artificial link builders to focus too much on do-follow links and then flag themselves up. Do-follow links are also harder to find and therefore make artificial link building more difficult, which is what Google wants.

I'm sure do-follow links do have more weight ultimately, but they are at risk of having their strength dialled down if a website's link profile clearly doesn't look natural due to an imbalance between no-follow and do-follow.

 

[justinaldridge]

The percentage of dofollow to nofollow is not a factor in Google's algo and never will be. It's a myth...as is link acquisition rate, deep link ratios, etc.

Nofollow links do not help a site rank and it's the easiest thing to test if you don't believe me. Google can see where the nofollow link points but it does not pass any weighting through that link.

Link building just needs to be approached as if you were properly marketing a business/website. People get it wrong when they try to game the system. Effective marketing generates links, followed and not followed....it's not that hard.

 

[fisicx]

If Google really ignored no-follow links, then it makes their life considerably more difficult, as it restricts the factors they can use to determine how a page should rank.

No it doesn't. Lots of no follow links makes it easier to build the index. It's easy to test. Get a page ranking on page 2-3 of the serps and start blog commenting or posting on FB/twitter and so on all with links back to your site and nothing will happen. You ranking won't change (except where Google reassesses your ranking based of other factors).

 

[HFE Signs]

Only post things that will be of interest to your customers, quality over quantity. Best to set a small amount of time aside for doing this yourself.

 

[Scott@KarmaContent]

Got to love the conviction which people say "Google definitely does/definitely does not".

 

[ZeroDouble]

It's funny, because everyone seems to be focusing on the fact of whether SM links help with google rankings or not, when one of the best things about SM is that it bypasses your reliance on google altogether. lol

With regards to whether it helps you with rankings - I've had press releases ranking page one for 'hot' topics before and seen thousands of visitors visit my site through them. Incidentally, I've also seen a massive increase in organic traffic for the pages that the pr linked to at the same time (dropping off after the PR stopped ranking).

Obviously, press releases are not really what you'd consider social media, but my point is, if google indexes facebook pages and tweets etc. then I don't see why the same thing couldn't / wouldn't happen with them too. I don't have any evidence of this happening, but just thought I'd throw it into the mix anyway.

With regards to the original question, if you want to hire someone to handle your SM, IMO it's probably better to talk to someone who understands paid social media marketing to see if will be a good fit for your business. Then go down that route if it's deemed viable, rather than messing about trying to build a following organically, at least at first, anyway.

 

[Scott-Copywriter]

The percentage of dofollow to nofollow is not a factor in Google's algo and never will be. It's a myth...as is link acquisition rate, deep link ratios, etc.

Nofollow links do not help a site rank and it's the easiest thing to test if you don't believe me. Google can see where the nofollow link points but it does not pass any weighting through that link.

Link building just needs to be approached as if you were properly marketing a business/website. People get it wrong when they try to game the system. Effective marketing generates links, followed and not followed....it's not that hard.

I disagree.

So are you saying that if a website had thousands of backlinks, and every single one of them was do-follow, Google would just ignore what is an extremely obvious indicator that the backlink profile has been artificially built?

Like you said yourself, effective marketing generates followed and not followed links. They know what looks natural, and can use these factors to determine quite easily whether link profiles are natural or not.

Google gets the best of both worlds with their strategy. Everyone has been put off bothering to build no-follow links, whilst Google can still factor them into their algorithms to help determine relevancy and the genuineness of the overall link profile. I'm sure there are also dozens of sub-algorithms around that which safeguard against various scenarios.

Just look at Interflora when they had their rankings wiped out on Google a few years ago. They paid to have advertorials on popular newspaper websites containing do-follow links, and Google found out within days and slapped a big penalty on them. They don't helplessly rely on no-follow and do-follow tags alone to crawl genuine links. They're quite good at figuring it out on their own these days.

Links are not just about passing juice any more. Google has had 17 years to develop their algorithms with thousands of Ph.D. engineers. I would not be remotely surprised if they factor in absolutely everything they can find on the web, but just utilise certain types of data differently.

It would not be particularly difficult at all to write algorithms which factor in parts of social media data in specific ways along with safeguards to prevent manipulation. These tests people refer to (i.e. start social media activity and see if the rankings increase) are too simplistic, as Google will have safeguards in place to precisely stop that sort of activity from having an effect.

It's also easy to provide different weights. For example:

Do-follow links on normal sites - x1.0
No-follow links on normal sites - x0.5
Links on social media - x0.1

Tie these three together with a ratio analysis to determine natural or manipulated activity, and you have a system where social media's effect is too small to change rankings on its own, but can be factored into the wider picture to help Google determine quality, relevancy and authority.

If you had dozens of petabytes of internet activity data at your disposal, wouldn't you figure out a way to harness it in some form too?

 

[justinaldridge]

So are you saying that if a website had thousands of backlinks, and every single one of them was do-follow, Google would just ignore what is an extremely obvious indicator that the backlink profile has been artificially built?

Yes, that's right. Because it's not about the links it's about the trust of the links.

Consider a website with ONLY followed links from the following sites:

BBC
CNN
Telegraph
The Guardian
Rightmove
Money Saving Expert
BT
USA Today
Irish Times
Sky News
Independent
Reuters

Now, with only followed links from these sites...does that look like a spam profile?

Of course not. It's about the trust value of the links and sites.

People get too hung up with nofollowed links and I don't know why.

Unless you're a link spammer it's something you don't even have to think about.

 

[Shopclicks]

Links on social media - x0.1

Links placed there by? The page owner?

These tests people refer to (i.e. start social media activity and see if the rankings increase) are too simplistic, as Google will have safeguards in place to precisely stop that sort of activity from having an effect.

How is that different from regular SM posting? That's a great argument for SM posts having zero ranking value.

 

[Scott-Copywriter]

Yes, that's right. Because it's not about the links it's about the trust of the links.

Consider a website with ONLY followed links from the following sites:

BBC
CNN
Telegraph
The Guardian
Rightmove
Money Saving Expert
BT
USA Today
Irish Times
Sky News
Independent
Reuters

Now, with only followed links from these sites...does that look like a spam profile?
Of course not. It's about the trust value of the links and sites.
People get too hung up with nofollowed links and I don't know why.
Unless you're a link spammer it's something you don't even have to think about.

The quality of links are a grey area. There are not just spam and non-spam links. An overall link profile will be scored in a multitude of ways.

Google wants to use links to determine the relevancy, quality and authority of a website. One of the ways they do this is by relying on the natural sharing of content and links around the web amongst the billions of internet users.

To take your example above, it does not look like a spam profile, but Google cares more about how those links determine the quality, relevancy and authority of the website being linked to, and more specifically, whether those links are naturally placed because of the quality, relevancy and authority of the linked page itself.

To take your example above, yes, Google would view it with some scepticism if they had only do-follow links on huge news websites, but absolutely no do-follow or no-follow links anywhere else on the internet. It's just not natural, and natural is what Google really wants.

Would they be considered spam? Probably not. However, Google may give those links a lower weight than usual if they can't determine why the website has such an incredibly unnatural link profile.

Just keep it natural is all I'm saying. If you carry out SEO and your website link profile consists almost entirely of do-follow links only, all from pin-point relevant websites only, then don't be surprised if Google views the naturalness of those links with some scepticism. After all, if it looks too good to be true, then it usually is.

 

[Scott-Copywriter]

How is that different from regular SM posting? That's a great argument for SM posts having zero ranking value.

I'm not suggesting that "social media SEO" is worth doing. In fact, my original no-follow vs do-follow point had nothing to do with social media.

All I'm suggesting is that Google probably do factor in all the data they are able to find regarding the quality, authority, relevance and popularity of websites to help determine rankings. I don't think they blanket ignore social media, or any data for that matter.

This search engine rankings survey from Moz is quite insightful:

https://moz.com/search-ranking-factors

They surveyed 150 leading search engine marketers regarding SEO factors. On a scale of 1 to 10 (1 being not influential and 10 being highly influential), the average score of page-level social metrics is 3.98.

So it's the least influential factor on the list, but still considered to have some influence in the eyes of 150 industry leaders. I personally agree with them.

 

[boring-friday]

edit: don't worry no more posting in seo threads for me. Does my head in lol

 

[Shopclicks]

They surveyed 150 leading search engine marketers regarding SEO factors. On a scale of 1 to 10 (1 being not influential and 10 being highly influential), the average score of page-level social metrics is 3.98.

Had the surveyed group been made up of 150 Social Media marketers, I'm sure the results would have been very different.

Nothing happens to a page's rank without at least some of the other factors included under the SEO umbrella. To test the 'theory' you would need a blank canvas such as the example I referred to earlier in the thread. Does it seem unlikely that 150 'SEO' marketers would have tested a client's ranking using SM in solitude? I'd be very surprised if they did. As mentioned by @fisicx , an improvement in rank will be attributed to one or more on-page / off-page influences, but not SM activity.

The fact is, that SM marketers & SEO marketers want social media to be a ranking factor, because it's another service they can sell. There's nothing wrong with SM as a marketing tool but to claim it's a ranking factor is misleading.

 

[Scott-Copywriter]

Had the surveyed group been made up of 150 Social Media marketers, I'm sure the results would have been very different.

Nothing happens to a page's rank without at least some of the other factors included under the SEO umbrella. To test the 'theory' you would need a blank canvas such as the example I referred to earlier in the thread. Does it seem unlikely that 150 'SEO' marketers would have tested a client's ranking using SM in solitude? I'd be very surprised if they did. As mentioned by @fisicx , an improvement in rank will be attributed to one or more on-page / off-page influences, but not SM activity.

The fact is, that SM marketers & SEO marketers want social media to be a ranking factor, because it's another service they can sell. There's nothing wrong with SM as a marketing tool but to claim it's a ranking factor is misleading.

How so?

Everything which has an influence on search engine rankings is a ranking factor. Some are just far more important and stronger than others.

Nothing happens to a page's rank unless more than one ranking factor is used, but that applies to everything, not just SM. For example, the title tag, which is considered to be the most important on-site SEO element of a web page, will not gain any sort of useful ranking on its own.

You can believe that there's some sort of hidden agenda if you wish, but considering that 150 well respected experts have suggested it is a meaningful factor, perhaps it's worth taking that into account.

I don't know how well they've tested it, but it's virtually impossible to test any isolated factor on its own anyway as Google will always analyse domain keywords, content, site structure, page names, load speed and many others. These cannot be avoided and will always factor into the results. Content is a particular thorn in the side of isolated tests as no two sets of content can be the same due to duplicate penalties. I suppose they've just based it on experience of working with the websites of clients on a regular basis.

Might I also add that the likes of Facebook has had its own ranking algorithms for a while. It measures the metrics of pages such as likes, shares and views, and then uses those to determine how often a page's posts appear on the news feeds of people who have liked the page. More popular posts cause others to appear more often and vise versa.

If they have something like that already, and they've managed to filter out a lot of the attempts at manipulation, then chances are that Google have something similar too. I'd understand the scepticism if taking social media signals into account was far-fetched, but I don't think it is. In this social media driven world, such data is very valuable indeed.

 

[justinaldridge]

If they have something like that already, and they've managed to filter out a lot of the attempts at manipulation, then chances are that Google have something similar too. I'd understand the scepticism if taking social media signals into account was far-fetched, but I don't think it is. In this social media driven world, such data is very valuable indeed.

But this is what I mentioned earlier. Google does not have access to Facebook data, most of which is private. It cannot use partial data to influence rankings.

It can potentially take twitter and it's own Google+ data into account, BUT, links within those platforms are nofollow and so are unlikely to have any influence in rankings.

In terms of "social signals" what's important at the moment is:

Citations - To help a business appear more real to Google
GMB Listing - A complete business profile with images, videos, etc.
Reviews - Google reviews from "authority" reviewers
User behaviour - With the advent of RankBrain this is really key now.

Trying to use SM to increase rankings is just not a good use of time. The time is much better invested in the above which, for most businesses, is likely to be much more beneficial.

 

[Scott-Copywriter]

In terms of "social signals" what's important at the moment is:

Citations - To help a business appear more real to Google
GMB Listing - A complete business profile with images, videos, etc.
Reviews - Google reviews from "authority" reviewers
User behaviour - With the advent of RankBrain this is really key now.

Trying to use SM to increase rankings is just not a good use of time. The time is much better invested in the above which, for most businesses, is likely to be much more beneficial.

I agree. My point here has always been that, in my opinion at least, social media can have some influence on rankings. Whether it's worth investing so much time and effort into social media in an attempt to increase rankings is a different story.

I would say that for the vast majority of people, there are more influential ranking factors worth focusing on instead which would provide more immediate improvements.

If someone were to use social media, SEO should really be an added bonus instead of the main focus. It can be a good idea for many businesses to use social media to increase brand awareness, build relationships, increase topic authority and reach out to new customers. If a business uses social media correctly for these benefits, then any SEO gains, however small or large they may be, will naturally follow suit anyway.

 

[justinaldridge]

Most of our clients don't do any social media apart from just update their accounts every so often. I encourage all clients to update their socials and make them interesting as it's another element of social proof and life behind a website or business.

I used to be highly active across all social media channels and in some situations it worked quite well for me and it brought in another traffic stream, but it's just so hugely time consuming if you want to do it properly and effectively. Most business owners just don't have the time and outsourcing it removes the "personal" nature of being social.

I personally do very little socially now and restrict myself mainly to YouTube where there are simply enormous opportunities...but again..highly time consuming!

I run the online marketing for a large music festival and it's 100% social media driven. SEO isn't something we even think about for them. But they have a decent following and that helps a lot. Getting to the "decent following" level takes a lot of time and energy but until that point the ROI from SM is non existent.

Most business can't wait that long although with the right personality, SM can work but you have to keep at it. At least with organic search traffic, as long as you have some rankings and traffic, you can forget about it for a few months and it's not going to have any significant impact on a business.

Look at what Dollar Shave Club did with their viral video...and they've just sold the business for several hundred millions dollars!

I don't discount SM at all, it has it's place but for most small businesses it's going to be of little value.

 

[fisicx]

I don't discount SM at all, it has it's place but for most small businesses it's going to be of little value.

^^^This!

Pete the plumber or Derek with his bespoke widgets or Mandy selling handmade bobble hats just isn't going to get the traffic and following on SM to make it worth the hours and hours of time needed to maintain all their SM accounts. Especially when you can use adsense and get highly targeted traffic for very little effort.

 

[UKSBD]

Citations - To help a business appear more real to Google

Most citations building is just a big load of baloney, It's just modern day link selling done by the same people who were selling links.

Here's why.
There are data aggregators out there who just feed 100's of directory type sites
Do we really think Google believes a business which has 100's of citations from 100's of different sites, is better than a business with barely any citations?

Citation building isn't employing an agency to blast your details out here, there and everywhere which they all seem to do, it should be about networking with local businesses to you and being the business they recommend when people ask about the service you provide.

There was a trend a few years back where all the SEO's (and others for that matter) were saying don't have resources and links pages, big mistake in my opinion.

If you are a local electrician it makes perfect sense to have a local resources page on your site with your recommended plumbers, plasterers, carpenters, brickies, aerial installers, etc. listed on it - that's my definition of a good citation (you just need to make sure you are one of the recommended on all the similar businesses local to you).

The best person to do this isn't some guy sat behind a screen in the Philippines, it's the electrician himself with a little bit of guidance.

 

[justinaldridge]

Most citations building is just a big load of baloney

I don't want to get into a discussion about what makes a good citation....but I agree with you, blasting to 100s of directories is NOT an effective way to build citations. There are only a handful of general sites that matter and then more localised sites that are truly effective.

Remember that citations aren't necessarily links but just business mentions.

In Google's own help guide to ranking better in local search it says:

Prominence is also based on information that Google has about a business from across the web (like links, articles, and directories). Google review count and score are factored into local search ranking: more reviews and positive ratings will probably improve a business's local ranking. Your position in web results is also a factor, so SEO best practices also apply to local search optimization.

Getting cited (not necessary linked from) on local sites and local directories is an important way to improve Google's understanding of a business for local search.

It works.

 

[Josh - FTZ Studios]

With regards to hiring someone or a business to do your social marketing, I would avoid it.

I hired a social media company 2-3 months ago, basic stuff, 2 posts a day across 3 platforms for £130.00(Cheap, I know, I learnt)

They failed to deliver. Spelling mistakes, grammar issues, poorly picked images etc.

Im going back to doing it myself! Use a tool such as Hootsuite or social piolet to schedule your posting. It will take a day of your time, but it's done for the month then!

Facebook is a great tool if you know EVERYTHING you need to know about your target market. The new pixel feature is invaluable and as a video production company, most people are surprised when I tell them that I receive around 20-30 leads a month with a conversion of around 50% simply by offering a high-value gift. Super simple.

Just do it yourself. Saves time and reputation in the long-run!

 

[fisicx]

Josh, do you get those leads from your FB page or are you using adverts or something else?

 

[Josh - FTZ Studios]

Hi Fiscix, my process is simple:

1. Content 2x day, Mon,Tue,Wed,Thur
2. On Friday, I offer a HVG. Paid in ads depending on the HVG. I have 2/3 at the moment.
free ebooks, conversation posts etc
3. Ask what they want, how I can help, creates leads.

Really simple.

Unfortunately I can't post any links because I haven't shared 30 posts on UKBF yet. Search FTZ Studios in Facebook and take a look at some stuff I do.

 

[FreebieBoy34]

Hi All
I am a director of a small business and although we do some social media (twice a week maybe) we certainly do not do as much as some of our competitors. Would you say it is worth employing someone on a part time basis just to do social media? Tweets, FB etc..How important is it for Google?
Thanks

Hi there! My answer to this is YES! Promoting your business through social media channels is very crucial nowadays since most (if not, all) of us check out these sites every day. It would really help to have someone focus on this area if you really want your business to grow...