Which holds more weight..Citations or Social?
-
If a client has budget constraints, would it help local rank more if we placed emphasis on building out a couple citations each month for them or boosting their social posting frequency? Does one carry more weight?
-
And we are so glad to have you, Scott! A very warm welcome!
-
Thanks everyone! What a great community, so glad I joined;)
-
Hi Scott,
While both forms of marketing are important, I agree with members' suggestions that citations should receive first focus. You might try to imagine a Local Search Marketing plan in this order:
On-page optimization===>Local Listings===>Ongoing content publication===>Reviews===>Social===>Linkbuilding===>Video
The last 3 items on that list may be optional, depending on how competitive the client's niche is. Everything on the list is important, but what you must do for each client will vary based on their unique level of competition.
-
When the target is ranking and the option is between social and citation... I would always choose citation as this might not directly help you with conversions but obviously van help you grow your local rankings for multiple key phrases.
If the primary need is conversion then I would say use powerful and effective social strategy as this will convert visitors in to leads!
-
Well they do Junk Removal. Competeing against big guys like 1800 Got Junk. I mean they do social, but barely. Like 4.16 tweets/mo and 2.3 FB posts/mo so far this year. As for citations they just did a blast on Yext and thats it! Right now they really need to do some onsite work and some link building from what I gather.
-
I agree with Spyder, but I also want to ask what is the goal of the client. Do they want to rank well? If that's the case cituations might be the way to go, but if they offer a cool service or have some form of content that you can use you might want to think about social.
-
Thanks man! I was kinda thinking the same thing. I heard a statistic a while back about how many tweets it takes to actually start influencing and the number was crazy big.
-
If they are looking for local leads, go directly to building Citations. Social mentions will do very little to help with Google local rankings. Realistically, unless it is a metro area and you dedicate a lot of time & energy towards social, your efforts will not be show adequate ROI.
Why Citations are Important:
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Social Media & SEO
Hi Does anyone have any good articles or case studies on how SEO/Social compliment each other? I know the benefits, I just need something tangible to show management, which justifies me spending more time on it. I currently do a lot of onsite SEO, but I know we're missing the content marketing/social media aspect and it's something I want to push. Any help would be great 🙂 Becky
Social Media | | BeckyKey0 -
Social media signals and their roles in Google rankings
Hello, I keep on hearing that social media signals have a role in the way Google ranks pages and sites, but for now, I haven't seen any hard evidence of that. Like any other company, we have pages on facebook, linkedin, google plus and twitter, to which we post daily. No, there are no clients coming in from social media, so I was wondering if it's worth investing time in adding every day updates, unless those count in ranking on Google. What do you think, is there a link between social media and Google rankings, and how much does this weight in ranking my sites? Thank you
Social Media | | anitawapa0 -
Can someone clear up social signals as a ranking factor?
I'm aware that Google have addressed this before and specifically said that social signals are not a ranking factor: http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2325343/matt-cutts-facebook-twitter-social-signals-not-part-of-google-search-ranking-algorithms However I came across this (admittedly great) infographic from Neil Patel, an SEO I have a lot of respect for: http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/01/31/how-social-signals-impact-search-engine-rankings/ In the post he specifically states that "both Google and Bing use data from social sites in order to determine how high to rank your website." I have always understood that social signals help drive links by spreading your content to a bigger audience, thereby getting your content in front of people who are likely to link. I also appreciate that content that is shareable is also likely to be linkworthy. However. Neil doesn't talk about correlation here, he talks about social signals as a ranking factor. Is he being misleading, or has the game changed since Matt Cutts said they don't use social signals?
Social Media | | CustardOnlineMarketing0 -
Ranking without links but through Social Media popularity
Does anyone have an example of a web page that is ranking soley through social media popularity and does not have any inbound (website to website) links? I am creating a presentation on SEO and Social Media and it would be great to have an example. Thanks Carla
Social Media | | Carla_Dawson1 -
Social media unclarities
Dear community, I've tried to find the answer in the Q&A but without any succes. www.facebook.com/onlinedesignmeubel.nl is our facebook page for our webshop. We have 563 likes, but in opensiteexplorer we only have 1 FB like. It is most likely an easy question, but i couldn't find the answer. My question is how the opensiteexplorer only found 1 like? How does this work exactly? Best regards, Martin
Social Media | | Onlinedesignmeubel0 -
How does Social Media really Impact SEO?
It's become a common refrain that social media is critical to SEO. Taking this literally, I have been examining the impact of social media on specific pages and topical areas within my site. Specifically, I am looking at pages and content areas that we promote and link to via social media and I am seeing zero correlation to SEO success. Social media is not impacting my rankings at all. And we have a sizable social footprint. Has anyone else done this type of analysis and seen different results?
Social Media | | AmyLB0 -
Open Site Exporer Social Media Data Accuracy. Anyone notice this?
On my homepage http://www.shipoverseas.com, I have 142 FB Likes, 9 Tweets, 3 +1s. In OSE it shows, FB Likes 86, Tweets 4, and 3 +1s. Does anyone know why there is a discrepancy? I am using AddThis.
Social Media | | Francisco_Meza0 -
Does social media really work?
I just finished a 2 week test using Twitter. The person running the test was tweeting for 1 hour every day, but the tweets were broken up into several different times throughout the day. She engaged in conversations, retweeted, posted interested and catchy topics and linked to our blog. By the end of the test, we only saw a 7% increase in traffic to the blog. There was no noticeable increase in sales. According to an article I read by Business Insider, Applied Predictive Technologies ran a test to help companies like Starbucks measure the impact of social media. They concluded that social media accounted for a 2% increase in sales. That's not much for the time and money that goes into it. What's your experience with social media? When I first posted this, I neglected to say this Twitter account is one we have been activly using for about 2 years, and we have posted to it at least once or twice every day for the last couple of years. And, we are a well established company for the past 8 years, and we regularily submit press releases and have written 2 articles per day on our blog for several years.
Social Media | | BradBorst0
