How’s my website doing?, asks the customer.
Well, this month we have higher rankings for 10 more keywords on Google. I’d say our effort paid off!
Really? That’s strange, ’cause I don’t see that effort in my revenues …

Sadly, this imaginary conversation summarizes one of today’s realities. Simple ranking results no longer reflect the actual growth of an online business.

This happens because of three major Google factors that change the way the SERPs look:

1. Localization
2. Universal search
3. Personalization

Subsequently, this affects the way searchers behave when choosing a webpage from the result lists they see in browser.

Advanced Web Ranking already helps you handle the Location and Universal search factors, with the integration of the Google Location and Google Universal search engines.

With the release of the new AWR 8.8 version, you can now approach the third factor – Personalization – by keeping a close eye on your social media activity.

Looking from the social media perspective, personalized search is effective only when the searchers you target are logged in their Google accounts. In this case, the search engine returns a personalized list of results for each individual, which includes pages recommended by his friends.

To reach this audience, you need to build a strong social media presence, constantly monitoring reactions to your content and activities.

There are three steps you need to consider for a reliable social media monitoring: listen, analyze and relate information to past events. Here is how AWR helps you manage all of them together in an unified framework:

1. Listen to your audience

There is a good reason why people have two ears and only one mouth … Listening to your audience is the key ingredient of a good social media communication strategy. The scope is to gather relevant information, based on which you can further take informed decisions for your online business.

AWR helps you easily monitor to what extent your content reaches the targeted audience, as well as the feedback you receive. With the new Social Media feature, from the left vertical menu bar, you have access to three social media interactive reports, each managing a different set of data.

The Social Shares report is one of the most powerful weapons in your new social media arsenal. Besides gathering valuable insights about your content, it allows you to peek at your competitors’ social media shares and compare their evolution to yours.

This is possible since the information is retrieved directly for the website pages monitored in your AWR project, without the need to access a specific social media profile.

Facebook, Twitter and Google +1 shares are displayed both in a comprehensive chart and in a comparison table, with the ability to select the specific date range you are interested in.

2. Analyze the feedback you receive

The art of building strong relationships with others is always based on the ability to analyze conversations.

Twitter, for example, is an environment where you can engage discussions with tens of people. Seeing the actual content of their mentions or retweets, organized in a comprehensive table, helps you analyze reactions to your social activity.

By connecting AWR to your Twitter account, you can retrieve this valuable information and see the exact Retweets, Mentions, Lists and Followers your profile has, in the Twitter report.

For example, mentions of your profile are retrieved along with information about the related users. Matching a mention’s content with the user that generated it helps you identify and further manage your most important relationships.

You can switch between different Twitter metrics by selecting the one you are interested in from the top filter box.

3. Relate to previous information

New information becomes much more valuable once you can relate it to past events. This is a key factor in understanding your audience trend.

With the new Facebook interactive report in AWR, you can see historic information on the number of Likes, New Likes and Talking about that your Facebook page gain.

This helps you identify possible problems in your social media communication strategy.

For example, by comparing the number of Likes with the number of New Likes over a period of time, you can see if the content you promote on this channel keeps the interest of your fans alive. If the values for the first metric is constant and those for the second metric show an increasing trend, this indicates that, in time, existing fans tend to leave your side.

All this information helps you make an overall evaluation of your social media activity, and periodically monitor the effects of your communication decisions.

Conclusion

Personalization is the factor that brings the most dramatic change to the way SERPs look. Social signals being integrated in Google’s mechanisms to interpret the relevance of results makes it more and more difficult to measure the actual effect of high non-personalized rankings.

The way to approach this is by reaching a wider audience each day, with good quality content. After all, this is not so different from Google’s scope which is to provide searchers with the most relevant and trustworthy results.

Integrating the Social Media feature, Advanced Web Ranking helps you monitor your activity on the social media channels and evaluate your efforts, so you can further act upon them.

Take advanced of the 30 days free trial to see it in action.

I hope you have enjoyed reading this article. I am looking forward to reading some of your user experience tips in the comments section below.