SEO, Social & Content: An Interview with Lee Odden

I was very lucky to get the opportunity to review Lee Odden’s keynote at ionSearch today AND get the chance to interview him afterwards.

Lee started by talking about how content is shared across hubs and really emphasized the point that content needs to be relevant to your customer and matched to the buying cycle. He then went on to talk about how influence and trust are key to SEO and social media harmonization.

Know your target audience and optimize for customers

The visual below was just one of many slides that showed the increasing importance of optimizing for customers and user experience. This was really interesting when you compare it to just a common emphasis on search engines.

Technical SEO is timeless best practice but now we must also write web copy that is highly relevant and useful to what our customers are looking for. Meaning that now we are not just chasing the most popular, but the most relevant keywords as well.

I asked Lee how Social and Search can work best together and his response was to “use social to find out more about your audience and conversations, topics and interests that help you build more relevant keyword targeting”.

Another great part of the presentation highlighted the ever increasing growth and development of social and the impact it has on SEO. He provided us with some very insightful UK social statistics that I would like to share with you:

UK in 2011

• 82% use the internet
• 48% use Facebook
• Business to Consumer Ecom accounts for £100 million

UK Search

• Google now accounts for 91.5% of the search market share
• Bing for 3%
• Yahoo for 2.5%
• Ask for 1.4%

UK Social

• Facebook accounts for 56%
• Youtube 19%
• Twitter 2.6%
• Yahoo! Answers 1.9%
• Gumtree 1.4%
• LinkedIn 0.66%
• Tumblr 0.53%

It’s important to highlight the fact that 23% of time online is spent on social networking sites!

Main Takeaways

1. Segment customers
2. Develop an editorial map
3. Optimize and socialize content
4. Monitor KPI’s
5. Measure business goals – see below
6. Refine and Repeat

What’s more, Lee was kind enough to offer me two more pieces of advice:

“Always ensure that you look at who influences your target audience and optimize around this. Then place this into a comprehensive editorial plan”

When I asked about links Lee made a great point: “it’s not just about looking at where links come from it’s also who they come from”, hence the importance of authorship.

The first thing I will be doing once back home is to buy Lee’s book ‘Optimize‘ which is all about how you attract and engage more customers by integrating with them via social media channels, content marketing and SEO.

A big hat tip to Andy Betts for arranging the interview and thank you to Lee for giving us his time (and permission to use his pictures!) For further reading on this topic please see 7 New Ways to Think About SEO Converged Media Metrics.