Guest contributor Bryant Jaquez shows you how to use social media to find, understand, and take advantage of new keywords.
One of the biggest changes SEO is going through right now is its evolving love-hate relationship with social media. While I am not going to touch on the future of social media and its influence on SEO, I will say that social media in general is under-used.
Your Facebook account is worth more then the twice-a-week links you post on your timeline to promote your latest blog article. For marketers who are listening, social media can tell us what people like, what they don’t, and what interests people more and more.
Here are four ways you can use social media for keyword research, and content creation.
No. 1: Gather keyword volume
Most social media listening tools allow you to scrape keyword volume.
They give you two key benefits that Google’s keyword tool does not. First, social media is real time; Google Analytics tools are delayed. Second, social media scrapers will tell you how people are using the keywords (but we will talk about that benefit in the next section.)
Topsy, for example, lets you specify the time frame, language, and social media source that you want to scrape. I usually set the time frame to 30 days, the language to english, and the source to Twitter.
During my research for this article, I tested out a few different keywords and compared them to Google’s keyword tool. I tested “pizzeria” to “pizza restaurant” and “pizza joint.” Both Google and Topsy agreed that “pizzeria” won out over the other two. This tactic is extremely helpful for local SEO research, because local keywords are usually too low-volume to register in Google’s keyword tool.
No. 2: See your keywords in context
The second benefit to using social media for keyword research is that you can read how people are using your keywords. Seeing a list of keywords sorted by global search volume, and their PPC competition is helpful, but it will not tell you how people are using that term.
Semantic keyword research has become a requirement in SEO. It is not enough to find out how many people search for a given phrase; you need to know what they mean by that phrase.
For example, is someone searching for the word “sweet” looking for a sweet dessert, or a sweet car, or a sweet person, or are they looking for the band Sweet? Social media will show you how people are talking about your target keywords. If your website does not match the intent of a keyword, you will not rank for it.
No. 3: Scrape social for content
This is my favorite use of social media scraping. Remember that the whole point of keyword research is to define the best way to target users. Well, social media shows you what users want. Tools like UberSuggst, Social Mention and even search operators can help you do this.
Let’s go back to the pizzeria example. If you need to write content for a pizza menu use this site search “amazing pizza” site:yelp.com. This will give you thousands of pages of user-generated content from people talking about, and describing the best pizza they have ever tasted. Take the time to sit down and read through the reviews, then use those customers’ own words in your menu.
No. 4: Go fishing for curators
Creating good content is not enough to drive traffic to your site. You will also need to do a little outreach. You can use tools like GoFish and FollowerWonk (recently acquired by SEOmoz) to find people who are talking about your topic.
FollowerWonk will let you analyze the author bios of a specified users’ followers. You can use this to create target content that you know people are going to be interested in.
You can use Followerwonk in conjunction with Gofish. Once you have decided what your Twitter followers are interested in, drop the keyword into GoFish to find people who are currently talking about it. Both of those tools will give you high-quality prospects who will show interest in the content you plan to write.
