🔎 Focus: SEO Strategy
🔴 Impact: High
🟠 Difficulty: Mid
Dear Tech SEO 👋
I did a small test on how social media and informational gain makes the win for GEO but not for SEO. Let’s consider first my experiment frame:
SEO: winning on SERP rankings
GEO: winning on mentions or citations
Sponsored by Ahrefs
Does AI Recommend Your Brand?
Track and grow your brand’s visibility across AI answers, YouTube, and Reddit.
Turn SEO into AEO and reach new audiences.
First, my keyword: “technical seo roi“
My favorite topic: how tech SEO helps my clients win revenue. I got the opportunity to write about it on the Oncrawl blog:
My article at Oncrawl’s blog
📗 Read my article: The Financial Impact of Technical SEO
🟡 Note: the title does not match the core keyword “technical seo roi“, ‘cause I play like that.
All good, so far.
After published I started my experiment:
Boost article ranking via social media
Monitor citations vs rankings
What I wanted to test:
Direct click signals: you can call this, branded clicks, if you wish. Basically how can I boost article rankings from social media (without using a direct link)
Citations win: how my article can be cited above all competitors thank you to my ‘unique perspective’ and ‘authority’.
Results are quite interesting…
Ready? Let’s goooooooo
How To Properly Boost SEO from Social Media
Social media is a free PR pass. Going viral is the best press you could ask for. Apart from the fact it gets you directly in front of potential customers, also:
Social media triggers branded search: user goes to Google and searches for you.
Social media boost brand authority: if your social media account has a strong amount of followers it benefits your brand authority.
Social media is used by AI: there is countless examples of Reddit, YouTube
Social media is the best asset for EEAT (Experience + Expertise + Authority = Trust).
I put my profile to the test
I got to build:
+47k LinkedIn followers
I’m speaker on SEO conferences
I’m on numerous podcasts (YouTube)
I run a newsletter with more than 6.2k subscribers
I'‘m author on multiple blogs (for example, Oncrawl’s)
My online footprint as author will definitely help my articles to rank high but that is not actually what I am testing.
When I published on LinkedIn about my collab with Oncrawl, I did not add the link on my post, I asked people to actually Google “technical seo roi“ so they can click my article.
How to trigger “Direct Click Signals“ from social media
🔗 To the post: https://lnkd.in/p/e-GXG6Zj
What I wrote on my post to send “direct click signals“:
Link is NOT in the comments.
How to get the article:
Google "technical seo roi" and click on the Oncrawl result.
I do not push users to search for the brand “Oncrawl“
I push them to search for a non-branded query but boost the brand with “direct clicks”
One day after publishing my article was ranked on position #7 on SERPs and it was #3 citation on AI Overviews/AI Mode.
I let this cooking. In the meantime let’s go for the 2nd part of this test: informational gain.
Is Informational Gain a Citation Factor?
Information gain is the additional information your page contributes beyond what already ranks for the query.
There are more than 11M pages/sources Google has listed for the query “technical seo roi“. 11 million!
The premise of informational gain is that the added value and experience you share on your content is fundamental to win rankings and citations.
My article follows no standard definition of ROI:
the impact on PPC
how Google loses money on bad tech seo
revenue impact from negative seo attacks
etc
I did not any standard definition of ROI and I bet 11 millions search results that the Informational Gain part is a fundamental part of my article’s current top rankings and citations.
To proof my point I put a DR 100 (LinkedIn) targeting the exact same query (technical seo roi). I wanted Google to pick my post up and rank it, so it did:
My LinkedIn Post had not informational gain
My LinkedIn post has zero value for the reader. Google ranks it purely due to the authority of the domain (LinkedIn) not because of the content value.
I love how Google likes domain authority abuse, btw…
Experiment Results
My article with Oncrawl does not only have top rankings but it wins #1 on cited sources on AI Overviews:
💡 Note: I use Keywords Insights SERP analyzer to avoid my browsers messing my experiments.
My theory:
The social media boost help my article go from #7 on SERPs to become #1. Here is the original snapshot right after publishing:
Because of the “direct click signals” + informational gain I could be top rank and top source for AI
Checklist To Be Chosen by AI Search
From this experiment I conclude:
Define the Information Gain: Inject a specific experience, angle, framework, or contrarian angle. In the era of AI, uniqueness wins.
Isolate Unique Quotes: Write clear, authoritative summary sentences that state a unique relationship (e.g., how Technical SEO impacts PPC). Both users and machines love it. Chunking?
Social Media Distribution: Use socials to trigger users to search for the target query and click your result directly rather than using direct links.
Free Video - Brand and Citations Trackers
Built with DataForSeo: https://the.organichackers.com/p/diy-cheap-seo-reports-1
Free Tech SEO analysis + 1-on-1 session
I am selecting one website per newsletter edition for a:
Free Tech SEO analysis + 1-on-1 session.
If you want to participate respond to this email with "Q4" and I will follow up asap.
Let’s meet in REAL LIFEY
That’s it for today, practical and simple.
Until next time 👋
—