1.
Search and Social: A Happy
Marriage
Cara Wiggins Gray
Manager, Digital Marketing Analytics
and SEO at Reliant Energy

2.
Topics for discussion
• What influences a higher search ranking
– the bigger picture
• How social media and search are related
• How to maintain a good relationship
between the two
• What does success look like? (how to
measure and report)

3.
3 Pillars of SEO
Forbes.com

4.
content marketing (n.):
a way of connecting brands with
audiences on their own terms via
shared interests.

5.
content marketing isn’t hunting and we
don’t “capture” audiences.

6.
we hunt for shared interests, then we
captivate audiences.

7.
Social becoming bigger part of SEO

8.
Discoverability | Social SEO
Know the impact of social signals
• Search engines have started to use social signals (likes, comments, reviews, shares, etc.) to
help filter out noise and determine what is valuable on the web
Ensure content is relevant
• Utilize individual platform targeting options to get the right message to the right people at the
right time
• Create hyper-relevant advertising messaging through geographic, demographic and
psychographic audience segments
• Irrelevant content (content that is ignored or flagged for spam) could have a negative impact
• Evaluate post analytics and learn and optimize over time to create the most relevant content
Keep keywords in mind
• Incorporate top search keywords into social content to ensure social content appears in relevant
searches

9.
Tying social to SEO
More on Social Signals
• Number of Facebook
shares
• Number of Twitter
followers
• Number of tweets
mentioning your brand
name or including a link
to your website
• Number of people that
“have you in their circles”
(Google+)

10.
How Social Listening can Improve SEO
Keyword insight through Radian6
Highlight top posts and shows top keywords coming out of those posts
Based on targeted keywords, can show you the posts and sentiment
around those keywords to gain insight.
Keywords and their insight from social listening can inform content
refresh and maintenance, which is needed to rank well for site

11.
Maintaining good SEO/Social Practices
Ensure your content is updated on social platforms along with site
content – be consistent with messaging across your digital presence.
Make social sharing easy
The importance of images

12.
Social Media Listening
• Social media generates a significant volume of
data from customers and potential customers
about the energy industry, the brand, as well as
specific events and campaigns.
• With a substantial volume of data pulled in
each month, much of it is of little consequence
and is often viewed as “noise.”
• The social media team is challenged with the
task of filtering through the data and analyzing
to derive actionable meaning.
• By analyzing this data, we can see how social
media influences consumer behavior, gain a
better understanding of brand reputation, as
well as learn how we can better serve our
customers or shape our messaging to attract
new customers.
• The purpose of our listening reports is to
provide a high level overview of conversations
around the brand in social media each quarter.

13.
Radian6 Listening Platform
• Intelligence about online conversations is critical. We need to know what’s being
said about our brand, industry, and competitors online.
• Radian6 is the platform we use to listen, measure, analyze and report on these
conversations.
• Radian6 is a Salesforce.com company.
• Metrics: buzz, sentiment, topic trends, conversation clouds (keywords), media type,
hashtags and usernames mentioned, Twitter demographics, and influencers
• Media: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, blogs, forums, and mainstream
news.
• Historical Data: We have access to social media conversations and data over the past
five years.

14.
Measurements and Reporting
Metrics:
• incoming traffic
• keywords driving traffic
• social media engagement through campaign
tracking

15.
Success Stories