I just finished a tutorial on the proper way to use aggregated tweets for maximum SEO benefits, and I thought I should also write about the way to sell this benefit to clients. While most potential consulting clients recognize the effect Twitter has had on pop culture, they aren’t aware of how they could benefit from integrating Twitter into their website and their marketing program. If they don’t use Twitter themselves, their first objection will be that they don’t want to “waste time playing with Twitter.”
I find that SEO is a great entry point for new clients. If they have any website at all, they are aware of the general idea of Search Engine Optimization, or at least know that ranking high in Google results is an important goal. They may have used an SEO to optimize their pages, and add appropriate keywords. They may even have a blog to give their site a little more Google juice. Pitching Twitter consulting as a way of boosting their Google rank always seems to get their attention.
The first thing I ask a potential client to do is use search.twitter.com to look at tweets for their marketing keywords. Then I explain that by adding a similar stream of tweets to their own pages they will be giving Google lots of these keywords to read. This is much better than having an SEO stuff their pages with keyword spam, since tweets are written by humans and have a keyword density that Google recognizes as authentic. Even better, the stream is always updating, and new keywords appear automatically as they become important to that specific domain. For example, if a client has a sports site, a tweet stream tied to the name of a specific team will suddenly be filled with the name of an important player as soon as he becomes newsworthy. Google will recognize this and direct searches for that player’s name to the client’s page right away. No SEO has to be paid to rewrite the page constantly.
Another benefit of having the client look at tweets through Twitter’s search is that they will see how many curse words there are in a normal tweet stream, and they may also see tweets from their competitors. This gives me a chance to explain that while any programmer could just add the RSS feed for this search to their website, it takes a skilled Twitter consultant to filter out tweets for specific negative words, and to block any tweets from competitors’ accounts. With the right programming they can have all the SEO benefits of a targeted tweet stream and none of the disadvantages.
