I have a post on this blog that's a top-10 result for a pretty generic search term. Yes, the page is relevant, and uses the terms in question pretty frequently. But, honestly, I don't make any effort at SEO on this blog: it's a soapbox, not a marketing engine, and I don't care to invest the time and energy necessary to get myself into the top ranks on the SERPs. But somehow I've done it accidentally, and I think I know how.
By linking my Blogger profile to my Google+ profile, my blog posts become "social media" content in some part of Google's algorithm. Because "social media" and the "live web" are the hip things in search engineering these days, that gets me an arbitrarily huge boost in rank. It's not based on profiling either: I can run the search anonymously and get the same results, and I can have friends that don't use Google+ run the search and get the same results.
Why do I think it's related to Google+ at all? My profile picture of G+ is right next to the post (though, oddly, none of the photos from the actual post are in there), and it includes the byline "by Adrian Price - in 70 Google+ circles". That's not part of my blog post, that's not even part of my Blogger profile, aside from the fact that it is linked to my Google+ profile.
Social marketing in so many ways is your parents trying to talk to you in the same language you use with your friends. To poach a phrase, it's so unhip it's a wonder their bums don't fall off. Honestly, almost every social marketing effort I've ever seen reeks of desperation, confusion, and so much effort trying to "seem engaged" that they would have saved time in the end actually being engaged.
So, any marketers out there desperately trying to squeeze every drop of ROI they can out of social media, consider this: it looks like, just maybe, you can get quite a lot out of it just by having it at all, even if you aren't using it to push out news, or contests, or desperately promoting your latest video in an attempt to force it to "go viral". Who knows how long the free lunch will last, but you might as well take advantage while you can.
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