Social Media & Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for eCommerce Jim Barnes UWSMC 1

Drugstore.com & Walgreens Drugstore.com – Pure play online pharmacy established in 1999 – Carry over 60K Prescription and OTC products – Approximately $450M in revenue in 2010 – Direct response is our game! Walgreens – Multichannel retailer with over 7500 locations nationwide – Approximately $70B in revenue in 2010 Mandate to ignite SEO growth in 2012 – Provide overview of strategy and tactics & role social media plays – Example of a typical Social SEO campaign 2

What is SEO? 3

Foundations of SEO The foundations of SEO ranking is relevance plus authority Relevance – On-page and off-page semantic signals relevant to the search query Authority – How important the search engines think the site is. – Based primarily on external links to site, age of domain, site traffic, quality signals & social media presence etc. 4 SEO Ranking

Enter Social Media SEO and Social Media Marketing are complementary sometimes referred to as Social SEO December 2010 – Bing and Google confirm that links shared through Twitter and Facebook have a direct impact on SEO Rankings SEO’s have suspected this since November 2009 following Google & Bings announcements of partnerships with Twitter 5

What Social Signals Influence SEO? It’s highly likely the following signals have a significant impact on search engine rankings – Quantity & Quality of Fans / Followers – Authority of Fans / Followers – Analysis of Friends / Followers Ratios – Social interaction data - Likes, Shares, Comments, Tweets, Retweets, Mentions etc. – Topic Focus / Relevance – Association Bias – Plus many more! It’s a moving target! 6

Social is Well Correlated to SEO Ranking 7

The Future? 8

Will Social Replace SEO? Search shows no sign of slowing down. Google had appx. $25B in 2010 revenue compared to appx. $3B for Facebook 9 Monthly Searches per Comscore

How we Discover Products The case is often made that social is how we find new products on the web At least so far, the data doesn't back up this assertion ATG Study on How Users Discover ProductsStudy via SearchEngineLand

Conversion Funnel: Social Vs. SEO Social media isn't the deal closer It’s the channel that creates potential for a future conversion by creating brand familiarity and driving visitors to content that further draws them in. SEO tends to convert directly 11

The Value of Social to SEO More traffic and higher conversion rates! – GroupM Research Conversion rates in organic search results for users who have been exposed to a brand's social marketing campaign are 2.4X higher than those that haven't (branded terms)! GroupM Research – Higher SEO Rankings due to positive impact of social signal on the search engine rankings which result in more traffic 12

Strategy to Ignite SEO Growth Content – Create high quality engaging content Social Media – Amplify content – Increase brand awareness & engagement – Create backlinks and increase traffic Classic SEO – Improve crawling, indexing and ranking 13 SEO ContentSocial The Trifecta!!

Onsite Content Customer centric content portal – How to Articles – Q&A – Apps – Tools – Polls – Quizzes – UGC – Video Blog Content must be engaging and easy to share! – – bloom?zlfid=111&recoName=zap_alp_p t bloom?zlfid=111&recoName=zap_alp_p t 14 The Trifecta

Offsite Content Facebook – Approx. 500K fans Deals and discounts Polls & questions Contests Give aways Expert Picks Encourage Sharing of Content Twitter – Approx. 4K followers Increasingly retweets, direct message to engage followers Tweet about content 15 The Trifecta

Offsite Content Cont… YouTube Sites – videos – videos Our Blogs – – rd Party Blogs Forums Ongoing PR Effort 16 The Trifecta

Social Metrics Site Traffic - traffic to our sites driven by social media sites Fan/follower data – quantity and trending data Social interaction data - Likes, Shares, Comments, Tweets, Retweets, Mentions, Brand Mentions Links -- Blogs and Forums Social content performance – ROAS, CPO, Conversion Rates 17

A Typical Social SEO Campaign 1.Identify Business Need 2.Scout the SEO Competitive Landscape 3.Determine customer needs 4.Build basket of keywords/terms and import into rank monitoring tools (baseline) 5.Develop classic on-page SEO content on product/category pages 6.Create site interlinking to direct site authority to targeted pages 7.Develop content for blogs, content portal, YouTube 8.Develop series of product centric press releases around content and promotional efforts 9.Amplify content using Facebook & Twitter 10.Monitor targeted keyword ranking, social metrics, traffic, orders, revenue 18

References fundamentals-pyramid fundamentals-pyramid facebook-influence-seo facebook-influence-seo seo-benchmark-report/ seo-benchmark-report/ media media yourself-as-a-business-owner/ yourself-as-a-business-owner/ 19

Questions? 20