Why Twitter is Critical to your SEO, PPC and Email Campaigns

I’m sorry, but business owners are blind. They see Twitter as a way to reach an audience of consumers, but they completely miss the real value of Twitter for business – A/B testing. That’s right, I’m talking about using Twitter as a true business tool to improve your open rates and click through rates for every digital marketing channel.

Let’s dive in.
You’re doing some keyword research for your website’s SEO, and you need to choose between “Keyphrase A” and “Keyphrase B” for the homepage. Keyphrase A is searched for more than Keyphrase B, but Keyphrase B would still bring a lot of valuable traffic to your site. Most SEOs will either stop here and choose Keyphase A, or they may do a little extra diligence and check out which keyprase has less competition. All competition being equal, Keyphase A will is crowned king. What’s missing? What’s missing is the questions, “What kepyrase will users be more likely to click on?”.

The Misconception
AOL leaked a study back in 2006 that showed the click through rates for their organic listings. Everyone still references that study when they say the #1 organic spot will have a 43% CTR. Even if that CTR didn’t change since 2006 (which it has), it would still be WAYYY off when applied to a specific industry and even more so query. Where am I going with this? My point is that if the #1 result has a terrible title and description it is not going to get clicked on nearly as much as if it had a compelling title and description. Obvious, right? Yeah, except SEO’s don’t seem to care. When’s the last time you saw “Estimated CTR” in a metric in a keyword research report? I’ve been in the industry since 2002, and I’ve actually NEVER seen a research report containing CTR data. I think a lot of that is because CTRs are hard to measure. Apart from Google Webmaster Tools data, which is almost useless for this type of thing, you’re out of luck. Or are you?

Meet Twitter – You CTR testing tool
Twitter is a gift to SEO’s.  Your Twitter audience is willing and ready audience to provide real time CTR feedback without even knowing it. They can help you  test multiple versions of title tags and descriptions to see which will perform the best even before Google’s bots get a sniff of your new title.

How do I do it?
Take Keyphrase A and tweet it out on Monday at 10am and 2pm. Make sure you’ve got a shortener like bit.ly to track performance. Then wait a week, and next Monday test Keyphrase B at 10am and 2pm. If you’d like some additional data points you can schedule your tweets to send at 11pm and 2am for folks in different time zones. HootSuite or Bufferapp.com can help you with that.

While you’re waiting for the results of your Twitter test, why not use Adwords to test optional title tag and meta description combinations for each keyphrase. Setup two ads, each with slight different titles and descriptions, then run both ads on Keyphase A and Keyphrase B. Now your testing which ad performs best and which keyphrase sends the most traffic.

The Results
Use Twitter as your first data point for keyphrase. Take your best performing phrases and create ad copy for PPC testing. Take your best performing ad copy combinations and use it for email campaign open rate testing – you can even test meta descriptions by doing a/b tests on the main email body copy, looking at the email CTR’s.  After testing all these channels you should have a good feel for which title and descriptions will perform the best for each keyword.

This my friends is a scientific approach to search engine optimization. It effectively squeezes more traffic out of #1 rankings, and it’s what makes good SEO’s great SEO’s.