Harmonize all channels and ranking signals into one repeatable formula

Joseph says: “Get your channels in alignment before you launch your SEO-prepared content. That’ll make a massive difference in 2023”.

How does social media impact SEO?

“Social media is the new backlinking juice, because of the expertise, authority, and trust algorithm. Today, Google wants to see the spread as opposed to focusing on one link from one person. Google doesn’t care about one person anymore - so focusing on getting a single link from CNN won’t work because there need to be lots of people that are thinking in alignment. You can achieve this by casting your net wide and having all of your channels in harmony with whatever you’re trying to create. Create all the harmonies and channels around your post, and launch out to the market for shares and engagement.

Schema is an essential part of this harmony because Google connects everything and sees all. If you don’t have all the connections, one backlink isn’t going to help you. Your content can take over the market without having a single backlink, but with the connecting web in place and through viral engagement. If you can get people to share your content, you’ll get people talking about it. By achieving this, you can move up in the search engine because you’ve cast your net wide.

Going forward, the new algorithms will probably be based on the user intent and the user web: what they’re doing, what they’re connected to, and what they’re interested in. They’re going to care more about that heart than any backlink to CNN. The future of SEO will have more to do with social markings than backlinks.”

Are you saying that dofollow and nofollow don’t matter as much anymore?

“Yes. Google has even acknowledged that they don’t matter as much. They would rather you do the right thing than just do THE thing. If it’s a sponsored link, they want you to mark it. If it’s somebody you don’t know or trust, they want you to mark it. They don’t care what it is; they just want you to be honest so they know whether they can mark it in their database.

All links count, all connections count, and all harmonies count. Something you think is counting for you could even be counting against you. However, if it’s not topically relevant or clear on the intentions of what it’s designed for, Google’s advancing AI is more likely to detect it.

Before, you could fake it - but Google is getting smarter. They know when the user isn’t going to appreciate something or if it looks like link bait. It’s important to create engaging content, that matches what the user wants and the searcher intent. If we’re marketers trying to make money in business, isn’t this what we’re trying to achieve? Sell people products that they want and that meet their needs. That’s what we need to do in SEO too: interconnect our channels and make sure everything is in harmony.”

When harmonising your channels, how would you approach devising a launch campaign? Should you publish on social media, split your content up, or pay to promote?

“These channels are not one-size-fits-all, which is why it’s important to harmonize them. You can then see what works, what fits your niche and your topic, and whether you’re advertising or doing an influencer campaign. As a general rule of thumb: if you have a blog/article you should multipurpose that content. You can even take a video, create some infographics from it, and share those on a separate website. You should focus on creating multiple pieces of content from a single article.

Let’s say you’ve got an excellent SEO-driven article with great link ads. What you could do to further your aspirations is take the article, and the images within the article, and turn them into social posts. All the H2s and H3s could become social posts. There are several AI tools in existence that can take a YouTube video and automatically create 50 Twitter posts from it.

You can take an article you want to reach number one tomorrow, harmonise it, and create several additional articles and smaller videos from it. You can challenge and have some fun with it since some concepts will stick and others won’t. If they match the user intent you can get them there quickly by getting all your social channels to fire on that content.

Write a blog post, turn that into a YouTube video, and turn that YouTube video into three or four smaller videos that get posted on Twitter. Turn that into a Facebook post, then turn that into a Linkedin post. Take this new content and share it. Communicate the new content you’re releasing with the Google Search Console and index. Once it’s in your sitemap that’s been updated in Google, you can launch your social media automation. Your YouTube video about the content, linking back to that video, will then get posted. Your social media posts get a little piece that’s a snippet out of that article. They then get posted on Facebook, Twitter, etc. as part of an effective content repurposing strategy.

All of these things should be monitored for engagement. As soon as something gets a bite from the fish, you should go in and attack immediately. Any bites that are attacked immediately can harmonise, go viral, and can get interacted with. As soon as there is interaction, Google’s warning signs will indicate it’s a great piece of content that needs to be indexed as soon as possible.

You can leverage tools like Hootsuite to harmonise with your content. Do your SEO-driven surfer content but maintain your social as harmonising channels to launch with. If you want to launch against me with a backlink - you’re taking on an army.

Start with the written content because you’ll be writing it with NLP words, headers, etc. before constructing a video. This is important because Google is going to look at that video for content, headers, topics, and words. You should do all your keyword research beforehand rather than doing the video first. Make sure all the compelling things are in that research and then do your video off the back of that. If you want your video to rank number one, you should do the research upfront and then put resonant content in your video.

When sharing on social media you can use different hashtags, different graphics, and different calls to action. If your written content is keyword-driven your videos will reach a vaster audience. With Twitter, tools can inform you about when you are getting more than two interactions on a post and then retweet it, for example. You won’t be retweeting anything that doesn’t get engagement so you won’t be causing red flags for the algorithm. Tools are automated to inform you on how you can update your content. When things are automated, you can send out the right messages because you won’t just be blasting the same thing out to everybody. An automated tool will make your life much easier because, when you launch out, it’ll tailor your approach to specific social media platforms.”

How do you decide on the keyword that you’re going to target for that written piece of content?

“Start everything with Google itself. Put yourself in the shoes of the searcher. Picture what they’re looking for, what they’re trying to solve, what their pain points are, who they are, etc.

For example, if they’re looking for a tent or have a camping event coming up, you’ll know to write about tents. However, it’s important to consider who the searcher is and what they’re searching for. When you look into Google to see what’s there, you can see if there are things that match the content you’re going to write. Address searcher intent from the start. You can assess whether what you’re seeing on Google is exactly what the searcher is looking for. If the answer is ‘no’, you should start over with intent and appreciate you might not understand the SERP.

Alternatively, you might not understand the person. In this case, you could interview someone within your market and pose questions from a customer perspective. For example, you could ask what they’re searching for when looking for a tent. If what you’re finding isn’t what you originally thought, go to the target, ask them directly what they’d type in, and verify if it’s correct. When you target this as your seed word the SEO will start working. Begin with your seed word and match the server intent to the content you’re about to create.

If you start with that seed word, you can look and see the topically relevant NLPs. You can decipher the appealing parts and write content around what is going to relate to the searcher. You can then get ranked and related to the searcher of that content. Start with Google, make sure that matches the searcher intent, and then start looking up all the relevant keywords. Once you’ve done that, you can start using tools like Surfer and LongShot to capture the right keywords. You can then hire a writer and match the brief you’re looking for, use AI, or even write the content yourself.

Ultimately, everything starts with the searcher intent.”

What shouldn’t SEOs be doing in 2023? What’s seductive in terms of time, but ultimately counterproductive?

“Lots of people in business focus too much on the numbers. Focusing on the number of users isn’t important, nor is having your KPI rank number one for a given keyword. You should contemplate whether the keyword matches the intent of the searcher. Focus on the intentions over the numbers. Clicks don’t count as much as the intention and are not as powerful.

Say, for example, you get 100 clicks. You should ponder whether it was 100 clicks of people who actually care or was it just 100 clicks. Ultimately, the numbers are irrelevant. What matters is what the numbers represent. What’s important is the intention, the conversion, or what’s behind it.”

Joseph Khan is an SEO and Digital Marketing Expert and you can find him over at humjam.com.