How To Optimize Tweets For Search

Listen to Podcast

Transcription:

Good morning Internet fans, Ryan Perry’s Simple Biz Support. Today is September 2nd. That means school is back officially. It also means that it’s Social Media Wednesday. Therefore, I have Sarah Giometti with Provaro Marketing. Good morning, Sarah.

Sarah Giometti: Good morning, Ryan. How are you?

RP: I’m doing fabulous. It’s Wednesday. It’s a beautiful day outside and we’re going to be talking about Twitter. So what more could you ask for from life?

SG: True, and the Dodgers are five and a half games up on the Giants. Wait. Oh, we lost your sound. I don’t hear you at all.

RP: A USB plug came undone, I think.

SG: There we go.

RP: I may have gotten too excited there and pulled my cord.

SG: I did have to rub that one in on my husband last night.

RP: Yeah, I had to be careful with somebody last night. I’ll push it but not too much.

SG: Yeah, I think that it comes with the years. I can push it.

RP: We’ve been swept a couple of times early on this season by the Giants, so I think they deserve the favor in return.

SG: They do, absolutely. I’m excited to see them sweep the Giants tonight.

RP: Yes. So we’ve got Kershaw on the mound tonight, so Go Glue, Go Blue. We should probably talk about Twitter, though, or maybe we could just tweet about the Dodgers, and that could be the whole program for 15 minutes.

SG: Yeah, no. How about we give them what they actually tuned in for.

RP: All right. We’re going to talk about how to optimize not only your Twitter profile but also the content that you tweet out on Twitter so that you show up in search not only in Twitter but in Google. I remember reading something last week or the week before that Twitter results, search results, are coming up higher in Google nowadays.

SG: They are, although they aren’t lasting as long as, say, your webpages or blog articles, but they do show… It’s kind of like the YouTube videos that you do. They show up for a period of time and then they start to fall off as they become less relevant, but they are showing up. And so it’s definitely important if you are using Twitter to implement some SEO strategies in your Twitter strategy so that you come up in both the Twitter search, which that one alone has 2 billion searches a day. Then also you come up in Google, so you have an opportunity to come up and have more exposure in both places.

RP: Okay, perfect. Let’s actually start with the account because the account is always going to be the foundation just like your website is the foundation of any SEO marketing that you do. If you plan on improving your visibility on Twitter, you always want to start with a review of your account first.

SG: Correct. So you want to take a look at your handle and your username. You want to make sure they match your brand. So, and then the handle… If your business name’s long, obviously, you’re going to have to abbreviate. The handle is only allowed 15 or 18 characters, something like that. So for instance, like mine, Provaro Marketing is too long. So I make sure I have Provaro spelled out and I abbreviated marketing. But my username, so when I tweet, it comes up and says, full Provaro Marketing.

SG: You want to make sure that that matches for multiple reasons. One, it helps your customers and followers recognize your name and find you. It matches your branding so it gives you more authority. Twitter and Google look at that and say, yeah, it all matches, it’s the same person. And it’s a better idea, too, to have it match. You don’t necessarily want to change your handle. That’s more difficult to do and it can confuse your followers and they’ll unfollow you cause they might wonder who the heck is this company that I don’t remember seeing before. So you want to look at your handle, look at your username, look at your bio. You still have a small amount of characters. I think it’s 160 for the bio. And but it’s an opportunity to tell people why they should follow you and it’s also an opportunity to put a couple of keywords in there. Obviously, with a 160 characters, you can only put so much in there, so you don’t want to just do all keywords and not have the actual sentences cause you do want people to read it and want to follow you. But it is an opportunity.

SG: For Ryan and I, we can put in there that we’re Internet marketing agencies specializing in a couple of different services that we offer. And that gives us the keywords of things, and those are the topics that we tweet about, are the things that we do for a living. So having that in our bio, again, helps with you coming up. The bio is a little bit more for the Twitter searches than the Google searches, but it does help you come up when people are doing searches. So you have the opportunity to have more exposure to followers or future followers.

RP: Then, what about like your profile picture? I think you mentioned offline that you want to name your profile picture when you’re uploading it?

SG: Correct. It has a little bit of SEO juice that you want to have your company name or a keyword, more preferably your company name as the name of the file when you upload it because that is part of your profile’s name, it’s the name of that picture. And so it just helps. As Ryan knows, SEO works better when you have all the pieces working together congruently. And so that’s just one more piece in having it all work together. The link in your bio is another one that… A lot of people like to use the URL shorteners Google and Bitly. However, that you lose a little bit of that link juice that you’re linking your Twitter profile to your website.

SG: If you’ve got your Twitter account on your website, which you should and we’ll get to linking back, it gives you more authority as it gives your Twitter account more authority, it also gives your website more authority. But if that URL doesn’t match and Google can’t put two and two together, then it doesn’t help you. So, if you absolutely must do a URL shortener, get a branded URL shortener and if you don’t know how to do that, talk to your web developer. That way at least you’ll have some branded-ness to it. Or just put your website, go to your homepage or go to a relevant page where you want to send your Twitter followers and that all helps into the branding and that fills out your profile.

RP: Okay, perfect. And then, speaking of URL, obviously if you do not have a linkback to your website, you’re kind of shooting yourself in the foot. That is not just from an SEO point of view, but if people are actually interested in what you’re talking about and they want to learn more about you or your company, you need to really just give them an easy way to find that out instead of having to do a Google search because that’s just going to turn people off.

SG: Right. Yeah, you want to make things as easy as possible for the end user. And so you want to make sure your website is everywhere it can be, you want to make sure your Twitter account is listed everywhere it can be so they can easily find their way to your Twitter account. So you have traffic, you’re encouraging traffic both directions.

RP: Right, so that also ties into one of the things that you want to do is if you want to be, if you want to increase your authority on Twitter, then you need more followers, you need more people checking out your account, you need more people clicking on it. One of the things that we were talking about before the show started was making sure your social media icons are not just on your Facebook… Or excuse me, on your website. But you also let people know on your other social media accounts such as YouTube, Facebook, wherever else you can and let ’em know, “Hey, you can also follow me on Twitter.”

RP: The big pushback I get from people when I talk to them about this it’s like, “Ah, but I don’t use Twitter.” Or “Twitter doesn’t excite me.” It really shouldn’t be about you. When you’re in business, it really needs to be about the type of people that you want to do business with and if those people are on Twitter or if they use that as a way of doing research or for social proof to see that you’re a valid company, a reputable company, then you need to be there. Even if it’s in a small part, as long as you’re active a little bit you don’t have to be a major influencer. But if you can let people know that, “Hey if you like to tweet more than you like to Facebook, then go check me out on Twitter.”

SG: Right. And it goes… There’s a lot of reasons to be on there at least a little bit. Just having the accounts you show up in Google searches, you show up in Twitter searches. At an absolute bare minimum, and I don’t generally recommend this, but if you really, really, really don’t want to be on Twitter, you can link another social media account to feed to it. So it’s not the best ideal, but it’s better than zero. You can link Facebook to it, you can link Instagram to it. At least you’re putting some content out there, and it’s better than nothing, but you want to make sure that you have the Twitter account. That you have it listed in all the places that you can, like Ryan mentioned.

SG: You look at your linked-in profile and you can add a Twitter account there. YouTube, you can connect to Twitter on the bottom of every blog post, you can finish every blog article with, “Follow us on social media. You can find us on Twitter here, Facebook here, Instagram here”, and you link to all your social profiles at the bottom of your blog articles. You’re making it really, really easy for people to click and follow you on the platform that they prefer.

RP: Alright, and then what about showing up in a Google search? So, if somebody actually says, “Oh yeah, Provaro Marketing,” and they’re actually not sure what your URL is, but they just go into Google and pop it up. Google’s now actually showing your social media links on the right hand side along with your company information.

SG: Correct. And an easy way for that is if you use WordPress, our recommended WordPress plug-in for SEO is Yoast. Y-O-A-S-T, and they updated a couple months ago to have a social media field where you can add all of your social media accounts. And then the next time Google crawls your website, it’ll populate onto the Google search. So, on the right hand side, when Google does the bigger box of your… The map of where you are and your pictures and full information, your social profiles can all show up there as well.

RP: Right. Although I will say we checked it this morning, because I did the update, I want to say it was about a month ago when I updated my site and I put all of that information, did a Google search for Simple Biz Support and that… The social profiles did not show. I showed, I also tested Ford and Toyota. They did not. And then, you did a Google search for Microsoft and their social media sort of had big icons, Twitter, I forget what… YouTube and Facebook and all those did show.

SG: Right.

RP: So the big question is, after a month I should’ve been crawled by now because there’s enough activity and social media activity on my account or on my website. So, not really sure what’s going on here just as an FYI.

SG: Right, yeah and I did mine a couple weeks ago and mine haven’t shown up either. So, so be a little bit patient on that one but pay attention to it if you update it. Just kind of pay attention to it and see if it starts to pop up. We’ll keep an eye on it as well and I’m sure one of us will put something out there about how to rectify that if we find a solution to why it’s taking a little bit longer. But you could also talk to your web developer and they can do a search for the Google… What was it called? Ha! I forgot what it was… It was.

RP: I’ll let you find it ’cause I don’t know what it is either.

SG: Oh the mark-up code, Google’s mark-up code to adding social profiles to your Google result listing. So you could always go to your web developer and just hand it off to them and say, “Do this.”

RP: Okay, perfect, I was going to say we got two minutes left, so if we have one more quick one and then let’s recap.

SG: Yeah, so take the keywords that you have been using for your SEO strategy and utilize those in your tweets, that’s really how you’re going to come up… Your individual tweets coming up in Google is going to be through your keywords. Again, you need it to make sense so that people who are interacting with you on Twitter and through Google makes sense and they can understand what you’re tweeting about. But take the keywords that you’re already using in your SEO strategy, use them in your tweets and your 160 characters, or 140 characters, and combine that with hashtags that are keyword friendly, or the keywords you’re wanting to come up with. Then watch your Twitter analytics to see what’s working and what’s not, and you can double down on the ones that are working, on the keywords that are getting you more visibility and traction.

RP: Right, and I really love this because the reality is any type of Internet marketing should… I’m getting a lot of feedback. Just a second here. Well, I’m going to let you talk because I got a ton of… It just disappeared. Okay, sorry, I was getting a lot of reverb, it was a little weird. I really like the keyword “research” simply because SEO… Or excuse me, keyword “research” for any type of internet marketing that you do should always start with keyword research if you don’t know what people are searching for as it relates to your business, then you’re really shooting blind, and a lot of people go, “Oh, but I’m an electrician. So everybody’s looking for an electrician.” Yes, that’s true, but they’re also looking for faulty light switches, why doesn’t this work? How do I install this? How do I do this?

RP: I remember when I first started in the business back in ’09, dentistry was one of the verticals I got in, and I was surprised there was over 200… I think it was like 220 different ways people search for the term “dentist” and that just blew my mind. So, if you just go, “Hey, I’m a dentist, I just want to be found for dentistry.” One, you’re in a very competitive market space because that’s the duh answer everybody goes for, but two, there’s so many other searches that are relevant to dentistry that we don’t think about unless we do that research.

SG: Right, so you want to make sure you have… And go for the longer tail keyword phrases. Instead of going for dentistry, go for “dentists specializing in teeth whitening.” So take your keyword list and utilize the keywords in your tweets in every single tweet that you do, so that you come up in the Google searches as well as optimizing for the Twitter searches, which again, are about two billion a day.

RP: Right, and then of course, make sure you hashtag those keywords, so if you want to be found for social media, make sure you hashtag social media. And then it’s 10:01, so we gotta wrap this up. So, real quick review, and then we’re going to call it quits for the day.

SG: So quick review is go through your profile, make sure it’s filled out completely. Optimize your handle and your name match, your branding, your websites there. Take your keyword research and utilize the keywords in every single tweet that you’re doing. Watch your analytics so you can see what’s working, what’s not, so you can refine that strategy. Take those keywords and use them as hashtags as well so that you’re coming up in both the Google searches, and then the keywords get you coming up in… Wait, the keyword… The hashtags get you coming up in the Twitter searches, the keywords get you coming up in the Google searches. I will get it straight. And then talk to your web developer about getting your social profiles to show up in the Google search results for your company.

RP: Yeah, perfect, and then make sure you got a URL back to your website so people can find more information. So, with that, Sarah, as always, I appreciate your time. For the listeners, we will be back here next week. Are you going to be next week, or are you leaving?

SG: No, I’m not, you found a substitute for me for next week. I will be on…

RP: Okay, you are heading… Yes.

SG: I’ll be on a jet plane.