It is clear there is a very strong and growing relationship between search and social. The future of SEO and social is also closely tied to content marketing, which we can see through terms such as social content, content SEO and social content marketing. This week in SMToolbox I take a look at gShift, a tool that embraces search, content marketing and social.
Background
The gShift SaaS platform collects and stores both social and search data, as the team recognized early on that to improve the performance of content you need to look at both elements. Currently they analyze data for over 10,000 brands and have over 350 agency clients across 22 countries. The aim of the gShift platform is to provide agencies and brand marketers with insights to help them create smarter content that performs better.
The gShift team talks regularly with its many agency clients to track trends in the world of digital marketing. Some of the recent trends they have have identified include:
- a clear shift in spending towards content SEO
- content curation is becoming a top concern for agencies
- YouTube is increasingly important, partly due to its use as a search engine
- the importance of reporting and streamlining the reporting process
Integrating SEO and Social
We are seeing the merging of aspects of SEO, social media marketing and content marketing. We have begin to see terms such as social content and social content marketing. The latter term was used 7 times in a recent Salesforce Exact Target press release.
The gShift platform platform integrates both social and SEO data to assess content performance. It pulls in both data from google analytics and from social media into a single reporting interface.
The overview screen provides a summary of traffic, conversions and top pages for a campaign.
When you move to the social tab below you can see how gShift brings in your relevant social data from the four main networks as shown below. The tool highlights your top social referring sources and your top social conversion sources.
Content performance
With gShift you can review how your content is performing in both SEO and social terms. For example, when I look at pages I can see the page views and SERP position of the page by country or city. However, I can also see the social signals in terms of shares across the four main networks. This allows you to assess the social and search impact of content.
In terms of monitoring content performance gShift has found it beneficial to focus on entrances rather than traditional page views, as most organizations want to know how many people came in through a particular piece of content. The integration with Google Analytics allows you to set up conversions and analyse these by organic, social, referral or other sources such as email campaigns. This helps provide insights into what channels and content are best at producing conversions.
The Social Keyword Research module mines Twitter for keywords, hashtags, content and influencers. This module provides users with alternatives to the keywords being used by providing related keywords.
This keyword research is helpful given Google no longer provides keyword data. gShift is able to fill in some of the gaps on keyword data, as they know the SERP rankings for keywords which are driving traffic. They use this data along with the volume of organic search per keyword and estimates on the percentage of traffic driven to websites from each position on Page One of Google to determine approximately how much traffic specific keywords are and could be delivering to a website. You can read more on this aspect of the platform.
Reporting
In my experience reporting is a key feature. Agencies and managers are under pressure to show performance and hence need to provide reports to demonstrate insights and results. However, producing such reports can be a time consuming and costly task. The gShift tool allows agencies to produce very tailored reports which can be exported as a PDF, Excel or Word document quickly and easily. The screen below shows the wide range of options for building tailored reports.
You can also schedule your reports to go out automatically to clients which is a major benefit to many agencies.
Summary
gShift's integration of social and SEO data aligns with the direction of travel in the industry and the growing relationship of both of these elements with content marketing. If you are after a single tool to track and monitor the performance of your total web presence then you should take a look at gShift. The pricing ranges from $99 to $2,400 per month. To explore gShift further you can request a demo at http://www.gshiftlabs.com