How I used forums and social media to improve Google search results

A client launched a new product and wanted to improve the organic search rankings in Google in a hurry.  Normally I would advise that SEO can take weeks, months, or even years.  Especially with highly competitive search terms.

The keywords they wanted to rank high in were very specific to the product.  He was hoping that word of mouth and advertising at events would cause potential consumers to search for the product type.  With a high organic ranking, the ROI for his advertising would increase.

Because the keywords were very specific and did not have a lot of competition (one other distributor to be exact), I recommended using a social media strategy to distribute content about the product.  The users of this product tend to discuss and share their experiences with others.  They are extremely active on forums and other forms of social media.  If we created good content and made it easier for them to share, the users would create backlinks for us.

After creating a blog, Facebook, and Twitter pages we began to promote the new product.  An informal representative for the company that uses the product began posting on forums asking for pictures of users of the product.  These users were often quick to share what they were using.

Even after creating blog posts, videos, and other content that generated large amounts of content, we were often outranked by these three sentence posts by the representative.  He simply introduced himself and asked for forum users to post pictures if they were using the product.  His posts were among the top search results even if the posts had zero replies.

It began to make sense to me.  The high ranking Google was giving to these forums was surprising but understandable.  I have used forums countless times to find people going through similar things as myself to find answers.  Programming a remote, hacking a device, creating an effect in Illustrator.  If Google is trying to give relevant results to questions, forums are a perfect place.

I began a strategy to target the forums.  The first rule was to do it in a manner that did not violate any of the forums' terms of service or make it seem like our posts were advertisements.  Many users of the product were more than willing to help.  It was our own forum "street team."  Like bands that gave local fans posters to put up ahead of shows, these users were excited at the chance to share their experiences and promote a product that they believe in.

I made a series of signatures that the forum reps could display.  These signatures linked to landing pages.  They posted videos and links to blog posts.  Within two weeks of this effort our search ranking greatly increased from 5-10 to 1-3.

In addition, if the user was following the company's Twitter page, they were even more likely to see our product as a top result.  Google has continued to incorporate more social media outlets into their search results.  Yet another reason to have a Twitter account.

The lesson is, if you have a product that is talked about on forums, use them in an honest manner to drive traffic to your blog or landing pages.  This can generate large amounts of traffic, word of mouth, and back links.  The necessary components to increasing your organic results in a short amount of time.