In an Internet with over 1,017,018,817 web sites as of this moment per Live Stats, getting your website and your products found continues to be a challenge. This is where the power of social media can turbo charge your SEO efforts. I’ve seen it happen.
I had an SEO engagement with a company a while back that perfectly exemplifies the power of this union. This company had a great product that few people in the medical industry knew about. This infection-control keyboard was designed to reduce the spread of germs, a great concern in medical, dental, public, and even school environments. And the concern is real. One test found that one swabbed keyboard was five times as germy as a toilet and restroom door handle and included harmful bacteria like E. coli and staph. So go clean your keyboard. I’ll wait.
My client’s infection-controlling keyboard was designed to be easily sanitized. It had a special key to disable the keyboard while you wiped it. You could even set a regular time interval for cleanings. A light would start flashing to warn you when it’s time to disinfect. It was cool. You’d want your doctor to be using this.
I was able to attract the attention of a popular blogger doing product reviews for PCMag.com’s @Work blog. I asked the company to send him a keyboard to test. The company balked – it was an expensive giveaway. But they found out that it was a pittance compared to the traffic and sales that this single blog acquired for them.
The review was popular. It was picked up and republished in full or revised form by 63 websites across the globe. Visits skyrocketed from 40 visits a day to a high of 2,177.
Then, the review was picked up by yet another popular review site – engadget.com. Engadget gave the review a unique spin and ran the article on their US website and all their international sites, netting the client another 2,729 visits just from that domain alone.
The phone at the company would not stop ringing. The website server couldn’t handle the unexpected load and the site went down temporarily. My client was flown to California to do a TV news interview about the keyboard.
How does all this social media attention help SEO? The social media ruckus died down after a while, as they do, but the links and the position increases in the search engine results pages stayed. For example:
- The number of inbound links to the domain rose from 734 to 1,933, which is an important ranking factor and quality indicator.
- Related key phrase positions in Google rose. The phrase:
- “infection-control for computer keyboards” rose from position 15 to #2.
- “mrsa-resistant keyboard” rose from beyond the third page to #1.
What can you do to use the power of influential bloggers to help your website get found?