Social's Impact on SEO: Interview with Search Guru Mike Grehan

Social's Impact on Search

Larry Chase: What's the impact of Social Media on search today?

Mike Grehan: Search is now the utility you use after you've been to Facebook or your friends. Now you have places to go and ask the questions that you would have been typing into a search box 10 years ago at Google or Altavista.

What you end up with, when you talk about social search, is another layer on top of this algorithmic search. It's a layer of verifiable information from a network you trust.

LC: You once said we could look at Facebook as a website with 800 million editors. Are the search engines taking advantage of that, or is Facebook keeping that data for itself?

MG: There's not a lot of data that Facebook cares to share with Google and vice versa.

LC: Is Facebook sharing it with anybody?

MG: Sure, with their advertisers. Facebook [also] has a deal with Bing to show search results amongst your social connections when you use the Bing search engine.

Social Signals and Rich Snippets

LC: You hear the term "social signals" being bandied about lately. How do you define it?

MG: Everybody keeps trying to tie social signals in search to links coming out of Facebook or LinkedIn that Google would recognize. But when engineers at Google talk about social signals, they are talking more about the power of user-generated content.

Google really loves rich snippets. It's more than just the title tag and a description. Rich snippets have ratings, rankings, thumbs-up, thumbs-down, 5-star ratings.

I did a local search and found one of the richest snippets I'd ever seen. It had everything down to a snippet from the menu, the restaurant telephone number and how to get to it. This is all very useful to the end user.

Using social signals is not about getting more links. You have to try to get people to create more content about your business because those rich snippets attract more users. The more popular that link becomes, the better your rank and the more frequently you rank at Google.

LC: Those 4-star and 5-star ratings were hugely important for increasing sales in this past holiday season. Are those competitive rankings important from a search point of view?

MG: They are if they attract more clicks, and if people stay on the page more often. Plus, you have to talk about where that content is coming from.

Feature-based rankings look at URLs that could be the perfect answer for a particular query. It's as if the search engine asks, "What else do we know about this URL? Oh, look, here's a video. Oh, look, there are ratings." It becomes a multimodal thing where you're pulling in data from several sources.

As a business owner, you want all of that incorporated in your search results so that you have all of these signals. You can compare two listings in search results, and one might not have a lot going on, whereas the other listing has all of these snippets that originate from outside Google. Which listing gets your attention?

Your Mobile 'Concierge'

LC: What's trending in mobile search? Are there differences in the way people use smartphones for search, or is it still all about GPS?

MG: There's a statistic that says by 2015 there will be more than 250 billion connected devices on this planet -- everything from toilets to telephones. So, we're not talking about mobile as we know it now.

I do believe Siri [introduced on the iPhone 4S] is going to be the way forward for all of these devices.

Not necessarily Siri itself but that type of voice-activated search agent which acts as a concierge, using all the information it has about you in its answers.

This search agent understands your needs, understands the places you go, pulling in material from Zagat and Google and OpenTable and information from all of the applications you have used on your phone.

LC: Do you think that because this search is voice-initiated, as opposed to keyboard-initiated, the nature of search will change on these mobile or personal devices?

MG: Because we are using more and more apps on our phones, it will become the concierge's job to pull out all of this information so I don't have to go through all of the apps.

The concierge will know the most popular sources of information I use, and the search agent will come back with a combination of results that will make sense.

For example, I prefer to use Foursquare and link my check-ins and comments so they appear on Facebook and Twitter at the same time. I don't want to have to log into Facebook and then into Twitter and then into Skype or what have you.

With all of this data that's being built up about me, the concierge on a device could be picking up that data, doing a search in the background and then bringing all that data together in a way that gives me valuable information.

What's Hot at SES?

MG: Anything that has social and analytics, definitely. People want to know how they can use Social Media and how to measure and justify it. How can they automate it, and should they automate?

A lot of the interest is in building the business case. Even though we feel steeped in online marketing, many are new to the business.

How to Get Your Boss to Spend on Social Media

LC: What is a good rationale to tell your bosses why they should invest human and financial capital into Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+?

MG: The first and most obvious one, of course, is that if you are not in the social sphere, be assured your competition is. You can't ignore 800 million people on Facebook.

Whether it will work for you, and what tools you should use -- these are the important questions. Twitter is a tool you can use for many things, but there's no point in setting up a Twitter account and then asking, "What should I do with it?"

You have to find out first what you want to do, and then see how Twitter can help you do it.

People want to know, "How do I measure social and tell my boss whether it's working or not?" Social analytics is probably the hardest thing.

Google is in the process of launching a new tool that allows managers of social sites to integrate their activity streams -- sharing, content voting and social bookmarking, for example -- into Google Analytics. That's how seriously everybody is talking about this.

It's been fun playing with Social Media, but now that people have experience, they're asking about how to do it properly. It's the same kind of evolution we saw with websites, where first everybody had a website because everyone else had one.

Now people are a lot more clear about why they have websites, so the next progression is on to analytics and making their sites work better.

Resources:

Mike Grehan is VP, Global Content Director for Incisive Media, which publishes Search Engine Watch and ClickZ. He produces the SES worldwide conferences and is a member of the Board of Directors for SEMPO, a professional organization for the search engine marketing industry.

Mike Grehan's Twitter feed: @mikegrehan

Here's the agenda for the SES New York conference, March 19-23, 2012, where Larry Chase will be in attendance.