Download the full white paper: http://socialmedia.alterian.com/learn-more/roi/whitepaper-seo-register Social Media Monitoring (SMM) can be a powerful supplementary tool to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for getting your web site ranked and found by your target audience.This whitepaper outlines how you can utilize that information to make your website(s) and Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns more effective.

1. White Paper
LET’S TALK:
Social Media ROI
With Connie Bensen
Four ways to take
your Search Marketing
to a new level with
Social Media Monitoring

2. Four Ways to Take your Search Marketing
to a New Level With Social Media
Monitoring
Drive better quality traffic to your website and lower the costs of your PPC campaigns
Executive Summary:
Social Media Monitoring (SMM) can be a powerful supplementary tool to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for getting your web site
ranked and found by your target audience. Every organization wants to better know their customer segments. Traditional market research
and focus groups can be expensive and time consuming. Social media monitoring now provides a cost effective method to gain an in-depth
sense of what consumers want and need. This whitepaper outlines how you can utilize that information to make your website(s) and Pay Per
Click (PPC) campaigns more effective.
You’ve invested in a web content management system so you have the right tool, and you’ll already have the industry knowledge for
success, but how do you harness this with effective, targeted copy to pull in your customers?
In the ‘traditional’ world of bricks and mortar businesses, you might have considered advertising or direct mail to drive traffic to your site.
The good news is that in this digital age, it’s even easier to connect with your potential customers! They’re already searching for your
products and services even as you read this. But are they finding you? What if you could ensure that you’re using words and phrases that
they’re searching for? What if you could know what words or phrases connect with your competitors?
1. Social Media The secret is to make it as easy as possible for search engines to find your site and the great content you
Monitoring identifies have created. How have you chosen the keywords that are being used for your search engine optimization
Keywords (SEO) efforts? What were the reasons for your choices? Technology now offers the ability to gather the
words and phrases that consumers are using online when talking about your brand, industry and
competitors. The advantage to using these words for SEO purposes is that these are the same type of
words that people are using to search for your products and resources! The value is that your site has more
targeted visibility. Getting ranked is one thing, but it's even more effective to rank for the way that your
audience is looking for you.
Here is the process for using social media monitoring in SM2 to identify words that are optimal SEO keywords.
1. Set up searches for your brand, industry terms and competitors
2. Create Theme word clouds for each. A word cloud is the result of analyzing all the conversations. The
words that are used most frequently are displayed as the largest words.
3. Author Tag clouds provide an overview of the words that people have chosen to use. They used these
words to tag their content. Their goal in choosing these words was to attract the search engines, so they
are ideal indicators of the topic that you searched for
All of the following examples are based on searches set up for: 'McCafe', 'Starbucks' and
What if you could know 'iced coffee'
what words or phrases Example 1:
This is the Theme graph for the search results for 'McCafe'. A word cloud graph is
connect with your generated by making the words that were used most frequently the largest. Words such
competitors? as chocolate, Free, mocha, mcd are SEO keyword ideas.
© 2010 Alterian. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.

3. Four Ways to Take your Search Marketing
to a New Level With Social Media
Monitoring
Drive better quality traffic to your website and lower the costs of your PPC campaigns
(To create a Theme Graph in SM2 click on the Themes report in the left navigation. Click on New Graph
and use the wizard to choose whether you'd like to use All Results or a specific search term. There is also
the option to choose all dates or specific dates.)
The word clouds can serve three distinct purposes:
1. The word clouds associated around the industry terms are the most powerful because they allow you to
describe your product using the same language that consumers are.
2. The competitive words also provide additional suggestions for keywords. You want to make sure to
incorporate these in the copy on the web page to improve the organic ranking for your site, then when
someone is searching for that keyword they will in turn find your product.
3. The words people are frequently using around the brand are ideal to identify keywords to use as
metatags. This doesn't have an effect on Google, but is good for smaller search engines.
In the third case you are identifying industry related terms that people are searching for in the very early
stages of the buying process. These are valuable to attract consumers to your site in
preference to your competitors’ sites. An extension of this idea is to create microsites for
Increased SEO will specific products and target audiences. This is helpful to avoid overwhelming visitors to
your site who are still in the exploratory stage. This same methodology can also identify
translate into higher keywords for specific customer segments for campaigns that are directed to tailored
landing pages.
revenue from sales and
build brand awareness The ROI (return on investment) is easy. Increased SEO means that more people who are
specifically interested in your product/resources will find your content. That in turn will
translate into higher revenue from sales and build brand awareness. An example would be to consider that
you are Toyota. You don’t want to rank for “car” because you will be pulling people who might not be your
target consumer. You want people who are researching cars to find you. They will be using more specific
© 2010 Alterian. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.

4. Four Ways to Take your Search Marketing
to a New Level With Social Media
Monitoring
Drive better quality traffic to your website and lower the costs of your PPC campaigns
terms than 'car'. So as Toyota you may want to make sure you are ranking for “safe and reliable SUVs, cars,
trucks, etc” or even more specifically if you notice that your audience’s conversation is really positive
around the hybrids, you can make “hybrids” and “environment friendly vehicles” the main topic.
In addition to keyword research, a social media monitoring tool can also show what your keyword density is
on your blog. Here is how: Enter the RSS feed from your blog as a custom source. The tool will analyze the
content and the word cloud will show you the words that you are using the most frequently.
2. Social Media How much time do you invest in researching the content and sites that are relevant for you to create links?
Monitoring Supplements Search engines appreciate diversity in links and your audience appreciates relevance. A social media
your Link Building monitoring tool can help guarantee both. Hours can be invested researching websites, social media
Strategy networks and bloggers who are writing about your niche. Then of course, there is also the challenge of
identifying the sites with the most influence. Of course, building a relationship with these influential sites
that ultimately leads to them linking to your own site will be in your favor as search engines value links from
other sites with relevant content. This is far more acceptable than paid linking strategies (which go against
search engine algorithms).
A Social Media Monitoring tool can help you find the most appropriate content with which to link and
provide a fast overview of their respective influence. This will help you to efficiently expand on your link
building strategy.
Example 2:
The number of stars indicates the amount of influence that a site or social network has. The ability to sort
by this aspect allows you to see the most influential sites. And you're able to see Full Details for each entry
which provides additional sites to link to (see Example 5).
(Under View Results, click on Show More Options. Use the pull down menu next to Order by and choose
Popularity.)
© 2010 Alterian. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.

5. Four Ways to Take your Search Marketing
to a New Level With Social Media
Monitoring
Drive better quality traffic to your website and lower the costs of your PPC campaigns
3. Social Media As stated earlier, social media monitoring will help identify keywords that consumers are using as well as
Monitoring Augments the sentiment around them. This information can guide you in efficiently identifying less expensive
Pay Per Click keywords to bid on but that are just as effective. In addition, based on your research conducted through
Campaigns social media monitoring, you can create landing
pages for your ads with higher relevancy. This will
automatically result in lower costs per click, as the
auction system used by for instance Google,
analyses the landing page when determining the
price you need to pay for a click.
Social Media monitoring also takes geo-targeted
campaigns to a new level. Imagine if you were able
to identify the physical locations of those
individuals with whom you holding online
conversations? For many of these online
conversations it is now possible to identify the
location of the content creator. Mapping this
metadata provides a powerful insight that can be
used for business decisions – for example it can be used to identify high densities of your consumers,
where there might be opportunities for new markets and likewise where your competitors are located.
Example 3:
In the example, the most conversations in regard to 'McCafe' are occurring in Germany.
(To create this in SM2 click on Map Overlay in the left navigation. Filter to 'McCafe'.)
© 2010 Alterian. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.

6. Four Ways to Take your Search Marketing
to a New Level With Social Media
Monitoring
Drive better quality traffic to your website and lower the costs of your PPC campaigns
4. Social Media Search engines are continually changing their algorithms. The best SEO can be built organically by
Monitoring Builds leveraging user generated content. The social web has evolved to the point where your consumers want to
organic SEO be involved. Providing your visitors with the opportunity to interact and contribute content adds value for
them and builds trust. Integrating social media into your site will increase your inbound and outbound links.
Inbound links are golden! The trick is to optimize your content so that other websites, blogs and individuals
link to your site. But what kind of information do they want and need? In what types of activities are they
interested in participating? Monitoring online conversations provides answers to all of these. You can find
out the interests, the needs of your customer segments and where they are conversing online. It will also
indicate what types of media formats - such as voting, reviews, forums, video contests and more - in which
they prefer to participate. Keep in mind that different customer segments have different
needs. Stay at home moms will want different functionality than career executives. Once
Integrating social you find the features that your consumers would like from your site you can experiment
media into your site with building them in to your new website. When you have people interacting at your
site, and you’re participating at the sites and networks they’re involved in, they will
will increase your in- naturally start linking to your site in their conversations.
bound and outbound Example 4:
links. The Domains Report shows the online locations of the search results. Analyzing these
provide many ideas. In this case it is surprising to see a number of links related to weight
loss. This is a great opportunity for McDonald's to market McCafe to a specific customer
segment. They're already talking about the brand!
If you find out that people are generally confused about a certain aspect of your product, you can create a
guide on your site that other people would want to link to for reference. In this case consumers may
appreciate nutritional information about McCafe products.
(In SM2 click on Domains in the left navigation)
© 2010 Alterian. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.

7. Four Ways to Take your Search Marketing
to a New Level With Social Media
Monitoring
Drive better quality traffic to your website and lower the costs of your PPC campaigns
Outbound linking is easier. This type of link building almost happens automatically. Your site should be
optimized for ‘shareability’. RSS distribution is one of the easiest ways to give your content legs by allowing
people to subscribe to share it. People who use RSS readers are generally those that are
blogging and commenting, and will create future links for you. The RSS feed also makes
RSS distribution is one it easy for you to syndicate your content on collaborative sites which will catch the
of the easiest ways to attention of new audiences/markets.
It’s also invaluable to integrate channels that support specific media formats like YouTube
give your content legs for videos, iTunes for music, Flickr for photos, SlideShare for presentations, etc into your
site. They allow people to find your content through specialty search engines. Most of
these offer embedding options and encourage sharing of content. As noted earlier, choose the format
options that make sense for your customer segments.
The most obvious form of outbound linking is to link to influential sites and that have relevant content. In
Example 2, you can find online communities that are talking about the brand, competitors and industry
topics. Once you identify the influential ones and the ones that are of specific interest to your online
audience, you can see the sites that they link to. These are the sites that they think are important and they
are most likely very relevant to their topic. They are ideal to link to and start building relationships with
them.
© 2010 Alterian. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.

8. Four Ways to Take your Search Marketing
to a New Level With Social Media
Monitoring
Drive better quality traffic to your website and lower the costs of your PPC campaigns
Example 5:
In each search result you can see what sites that specific site is linking to.
(In View Results every search result has its own tool bar. This provides access to the 36 fields of metadata.
Click on Full Details on the right. Then click on the Analysis tab to see the Links to Related Websites.)
Conclusion A social media monitoring tool offers a multitude of opportunities to maximize your SEO efforts by
leveraging the new opportunities that the social web offers. Your consumers are expressing themselves
online and providing all of the key words and phrases that they’re searching for. Are you listening?
Monitoring and analyzing those conversations will provide incredible insight and make your SEO efforts all
that much more effective.
© 2010 Alterian. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.

9. Four Ways to Take your Search Marketing
to a New Level With Social Media
Monitoring
Drive better quality traffic to your website and lower the costs of your PPC campaigns
About the “Let’s Social Media marketing is providing a whole new dimension for brands to connect with consumers. The
Talk” Series with social web is a vast entity and every marketer needs a tool to harness the information in the most cost
Connie Bensen effective and efficient manner. A social media monitoring tool offers the ability to maximize the digital
portion of your marketing budget in order to create, execute, measure and report on a social media
strategy.
The Let's Talk Series, by Connie Bensen, is a series of 10 whitepapers describing the variety of ways that
marketers can increase the ROI of their marketing efforts. Topics will include how to use a social media
monitoring tool for SEO, Lead Generation, Social Media campaigns, Customer Service, Competitive
Insight, Corporate marketing, PR and reputation management, etc.
Connie is the Director of Social Media and Community Strategy at Alterian, which provides leading
marketing products for the enterprise. She is a key voice amongst online Community Managers. Her blog,
www.conniebensen.com is recognized as a leading resource for cultivating online communities, providing
best practices for this emerging role and it is listed in Forbes.com as one of the 20 Best Marketing and
Social Media Blogs by Women.
SM2 Social Media Alterian’s SM2 is a social media monitoring and analysis solution designed for PR and
Marketing professionals. SM2 helps you track conversations, review positive/negative
Monitoring (SMM) sentiment for your brand, clients, competitors and partners across social media channels
such as blogs, wikis, micro-blogs, social networks, video/photo sharing sites and real-time
alerts.
About Alterian
Alterian (LSE: ALN) empowers organizations to create relevant, effective and engaging experiences with
their audience that help build value and reinforce commitment to their brand, through the use of the
Alterian Integrated Marketing Platform. Alterian drives the transformation of marketing and
communications, making it practical and cost-effective for companies to orchestrate multichannel
engagement with the individual.
Alterian’s unprecedented integration of analytics, content and execution through industry leading tools,
such as the Dynamic Messenger email platform, SM2 Social Media Monitoring platform and the award
winning Content Management solutions, enables companies to build integrated communication strategies
which create a true picture of the individual.
Alterian works with marketing services partners, system integrators and agencies who recognize the need
to plan and deliver coordinated customer engagement services in partnership with their clients. For more
information about Alterian, products within the Alterian Integrated Marketing Platform or Alterian’s Partner
Network, visit www.alterian.com or the Alterian blog at www.engagingtimes.com.
© 2010 Alterian. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.

10. White Paper
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