The 3 SEO tips that worked for McDonald’s
You’re at work. It’s hot and sticky, your mouth is dry…you’re thirsty. You log into Facebook and something on the homepage feed makes you drool. Lucy likes McDonald’s new Frozen Strawberry Lemonade. Mmmm.
You Google the product and the search results are crowned with tempting money-off promotions. Next thing you know, you’re in the queue at Maccy D’s satisfying your craving.
The fast food giant has attributed its 3.1% May sales surge to, amongst other factors, new unique promotional tie-ins. Here follow three SEO tips drawn from McDonald’s latest social media strategy that will drive SEO rankings for any social page:
1. Link from your homepage
It might seem a no-brainer, but a surprising six of the top 20 most searched for retail brands failed to include any social media integration on their homepage. McDonald’s links to its promotions, YouTube,Twitter and Facebook marketing activity via its homepage. Search engines value these links highly, so miss this opportunity at your peril, and use your brand name in the link for maximum effect.
2. Use brand names in posts
It’s common knowledge that URLs that match search terms result in high SEO rankings on that search. With this in mind, McDonald’s made sure to launch Frozen Strawberry Lemonade with appropriately titled Facebook posts and tweets optimised with hashtags. The same applies for words used in any social media posts, so pepper your business blog liberally with both company and product names.
3. Get ‘likes’
Crowd science plays a major role in the search algorithms that affect your ranking. Link building is one way to get noticed. Likes and follows on social sites are another. To become truly popular in the social space requires buckets of creativity and originality. People like humour, but they really love offers and promotions. McDonald’s used a $1-off coupon to introduce its Frozen Strawberry Lemonade to its 9million+ Facebook fans, and more than 3,000 of them ‘liked’ it.
Tips adapted from searchenginewatch.com in conjunction with BrightEdge Technologies
Excellent! Goes to show that you can use Social Media for Search Engine Optimization as well as connecting with people. It used to be “It’s not what you know, but who you know”, today with all the powerful Social Media sites, it is more like “It’s not what you know, but who knows you”.