Using Twitter to Rank in Google Real Time Search

We get a lot of questions at 6S Marketing about how to optimize websites and social media for new Google search features like social search, rich snippets, and real-time search. These are things that our team of 25+ Internet marketing strategists, social media experts, SEO (search engine optimization), SEM (search engine marketing), and analytics specialists are constantly researching and testing.

The most important thing to understand about SEM for Google search features is that the same strategy will never apply to all websites.  An e-commerce enabled dynamic website will require a different web strategy than that of a restaurant, a news portal, or a mobile phone company. Tactics may vary, but keeping up to date with new search developments and always adapting your search strategy is a must.

Getting Listed on Result Page #1 of Google’s Real-Time Search

Recently I had the opportunity to research a few optimization tactics for Google’s new real-time search feature. Two important things to note before you consider using this strategy for your own clients or website:

1. This research was not the product of a formal SEO experiment.  In other words, although it worked for me, I never tried to have a 3^rd party replicate my results, and I didn’t use any kinds of controlling factors to isolate any variables. It was just a test, not a formal experiment. If you yourself replicate these results, I’d love to hear your feedback in the comments section below.




2. To reiterate another point above, this tactic won’t make sense for EVERY client’s website.  That’s right, if you are doing SEM for your engineering client, they probably won’t benefit from this type of tactic at all. You can be the judge of the kinds of websites that can genuinely benefit from this type of optimization strategy.

My goal for this test was to develop an optimization tactic that a client could use in order to consistently get listed within Google’s real-time search results.

Targeting Google Real Time Search with Tweets

We know that social media content makes up a huge percentage of the results displayed within Google’s real-time search feature, so I decided that Twitter was probably the best tool I had available to run the test. I used my own personal @jzbecker account to try out the tactic.

Step 1: Find a Topic With High Search Volume

Google’s real-time search results don’t appear on all result pages; only on those of search terms that are particularly popular at the time. In order to run a test on real-time search I therefore needed to figure out which searches at Google.com were currently the most popular.  For this I turned to Hot Topics, a new feature in Google Trends that identifies the keywords of topics that are currently receiving the highest volumes of searches. By seeing which topics were trending in Hot Topics, I was able to easily identify result pages where I knew real-time search was likely being displayed.

At the time, the top two trending topics were “state of the union address”, and “obama gop” so I decided to try to optimize for these two topics.

Step 2: Optimizing my Tweets for Search

Next I used my @jzbecker Twitter account to tweet about these two topics.  In order to create the best possible tweets for the test, I ran a quick search on Google.com for “state of the union address” and then “obama gop”.  The purpose was to identify some highly relevant content I could include as links within my tweets.  Through my Google search I found video footage content that was relevant to “state of the union address” and “obama gop” at The White House and CBS YouTube channels respectively.

Finally, it was time to decide what I was actually going to write within each tweet.  Within the first tweet I included the exact same keyphrase that had been listed within Google Hot Topics; “state of the union address”.  I decided to take a different approach with the second tweet and simply include the terms “obama” and “gop” contextually within the copy of the message. Shortened versions of URLs to the video content I found were included within each tweet by using HootSuite, my favorite social media management tool.  I also chose to include a hashtag within the second tweet in order further optimize it for the keyword I was targeting. In this case I used “#gop”.

Using the “#” within a tweet is a strong indication of the overall subject of your content to both search engines and users. It’s an excellent way of optimizing Twitter updates for a specific keyword or phrase. (I talk about this in a bit more detail in my last blog post, Strategizing for Google in 2010.)

Step 3: Wait for it .. Wait for it …

Here’s a screenshot of how the two tweets looked on my Twitter page:

I sent off both tweets within about 2-3 minutes of one another. To my amazement, one of them (the Obama GOP tweet) was listed within the Google real-time search results only moments later!

Not too shabby! The test worked! My tweet was listed in the real-time results for the search “obama gop”; the exact same topic that I’d targeted and optimized it for. Notice how Google has highlighted the keywords “obama” and “gop” in bold, and both the YouTube link and hashtag “#gop” in blue?

This is part of how Google helps users to determine the relevance of their own search results.  Links are returned within search snippets in blue, and matching keywords are returned in bold black letters. How you format a tweet, and how Google then displays it as a snippet, has a huge effect on your click through rates. And while the tactic worked, perfectly optimizing tweets for improved click-through rates could likely be the subject of an entirely different blog post.

Getting Listed on Google’s Result Page #1

So after all that effort, how much traffic can this tactic actually bring to your website or Twitter page? The answer is: it depends.

Instead of including my own unique content within my tweet, I used videos from other organizations’ YouTube channels.  Rather than clicking through to my personal Twitter page, most of the traffic my tweet received from getting listed in real-time search seems to have gone directly from the Google result page to the YouTube videos themselves. So in order to truly maximize the benefits of this tactic, I’d always recommend tweeting about your own relevant and unique content rather than simply re-posting somebody else’s.

The important thing to consider here is that my tweet almost instantly surfaced on Google’s #1 results page for the exact same keywords I had optimized it for.  This is even more significant because of the high volumes of traffic this term was getting at the time, the amount of competing content for result page #1, and the incredibly short amount of time it took me to put the test together (only about 5 minutes btw).

I’ll leave the best usage of this tactic for your own determination, but if you discover anything worth sharing don’t be shy; drop us a comment in the comments section below.

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