Onsite and offsite social engagement (Part 5 of 5)
As the 5th part of the Beginners guide to SEO series, I'll be providing an overview of great ways to engage your visitors.
The internet is becoming an increasingly interactive and engaging place to be. People are taking a greater interest in social media year-on-year.
Estimates suggest that there are 150+ million websites that are live on the web, creating a huge incentive to make your website more than just a one-visit wonder.
Onsite Social Engagement
Unfortunately there is not a benchmark that I can provide for returning visitors as each niche and website's purpose is really quite different. A high proportion of returning visits can mean that you are serving those visits very well indeed...better still if we are talking 1,000's of visitors each month that are continually rising. This would suggest that visits are finding great value in the services or information that you are providing.
User-generated content
One great way to help visitors engage with your website and/or company is to provide them with the opportunity to interact with what has been communicated. The communication process therefore becomes much more 2-way and can field great ideas, provide sentiment feedback and add value to the website owners too. There is a degree of honesty too, to any communications process where the reciprocation of communication.
User-generated content is great for SEO. As we know your ideal visitors can use a wide-range of keywords that is not always found from digging around with keyword research tools, so this fresh content can provide a great way of increasing visitor figures, relevancy and a 2-way interaction.
This user-generated content can be created by things like:
- Forums – especially helpful for those in technical fields, or those where people already have a strong opinion about it. Sectors might include: SEO, music, politics.
- Blogs are a relatively easily managed way of promoting topic specific content without the necessarily needing to login.
- Reviews of products and services as part of your shopping cart – all the more important for ecommerce sites that frequently struggle to generate optimised product pages.
Onsite Social Networking
One excellent way to help your content spread via social media platforms is to integrate social media applications / widgets into your site. This helps your visitors take something away with them and potentially share it with people in their network. For instance, you could look to integrate:
Offsite Social Engagement
One of the talks of the town lately has been Twitter. Twitter is a micro-blogging service where you can provide updates on your activity, share news and views amongst people that you decide to follow and be followed by. It is a platform for conversation en mass. Twitter has stated that it is open for use by ecommerce too, which means that companies can share content and special offers will people that decide to follow them...a great way to become known by your ideal customers and create an easily accessible way to interact with people in your online neighbourhood.
Social Media and bookmarking sites are a great way to mix with like-minded people. Not only do they provide webmasters the chance to be recommended but they can also draw people in from sites where thye come recommended.
Universal Search and Media Interaction
With the rise of multiple forms of media appearing in the search engine results pages, it is worth considering how you could diversify the range of content that your organisation develops...something other than simple, onpage text can be very sharable: videos, cartoons and jokes are amongst the most popular items to share. If you have a variety of forms of media, that you optimise appropriately, and of course go about promoting as helpful / funny / interesting resources, then you have a chance of ranking in the SERPs on more than one instance.
Consider optimising:
...in addition to more traditional forms of content of course.
USP – Unique Selling Point
To answer the question of why people would return back to your site, it is usually because there is something novel about the content or the way it is presented.
When we are talking about social engagement, it is often about providing content, services or products that people want to share with their friends, colleagues or family – which often means it needs to be something more than a corporate message.
A personal touch can go a long way...a guy that lives and breathes wine in social media circles can build almost 90,000 followers on Twitter simply by adding that personal touch – a colossal reach.
Other global corporations are developing their brand exposure using social media in a wide number of ways. Dell is a great example, and has proved to be an impressive commercial success...they have developed there USP, into personal spec laptops and computers at discounted prices, that are continually changing and provides something that people can stay engage with.
Things like mobile convenience can provide a great service to your visitors, so is your website compatible for people to use on their mobile phones or PDA's? This can provide an excellent USP in the right market.
Social Media Monitoring Tools
Keep your eyes peeled on what's happening in your online neighbourhood, both around your brand and also around key search terms...who are the influencers, where is the conversation taking place, why is it taking place there, what can you do to put yourself at the centre of the conversation?
There are plenty of free social media monitoring tools available...try Google Alerts which emails you when Google finds something mentioning your keywords, Monitter that tracks Twitter conversations, or Board Reader that covers forums.
Either way, if you stick to the rule that you will try to engage your visits in a simple message that adds value, you'll be just fine! Any questions or comments, do of course leave them below...
Posted By: Ben
22 March 2009