Yesterday morning, I had the opportunity to moderate a social media panel at the Infopresse conference on social networking. Sitting on my panel was Guillaume Bouchard from NVI, a Montreal-based SEO/SMO firm. He explained to the crowd of more than 280 people how, by using social media tools, he manages to generate brand awareness and increase the online street cred of Canpages, a Canadian directory company competing against Yellow Pages Group in Canada.
It starts with the creation of original and quirky content in the Canpages blog. His team then seeds that content in the various social news sites like Digg and Reddit. Working with a large network of friends and contacts, he’s able to catch the eye of online influencers who might (or might not) promote that piece of original content.
His best success so far with Canpages has been this blog post about “Weird Canadian Restaurants”. It was submitted to Digg and generated 676 diggs and 101 comments. It was promoted to the first page of the site and generated good traffic (he did not disclose how much) for the Canpages blog. It was also favorited by people in StumbleUpon, another social tool that has the reputation of driving a lot of traffic. The post was well enough crafted to be picked up by Dan Mitchell from the New York Times, which generated some more traffic to the Canpages blog.
What it means: a great use (and a great understanding) of social media tools and sites to build a new directory brand and make it more exciting for “cool kids”. This is also a great strategy to build new incoming links to your domain, thereby increasing your page rank in Google. You’ve got to wonder though if there are long-lasting positive effects from both a brand equity and online directory site usage but I don’t think it hurts given the runner-up position they occupy in the market.
Sebastien Provencher 
Pretty good success story (especially with NYT linkage).
Pretty good success story (especially with NYT linkage).
another interesting fact is that the trafic sent to the canpages blog was mainly canadian even if we used american social news sites.
another interesting fact is that the trafic sent to the canpages blog was mainly canadian even if we used american social news sites.
Actually, we got over 50 000 visitors from the post and keep getting daily traffic every day since it nows ranks for words like “Canadian Restaurants”. Also, the overall traffic of the site increased alot since then as Google started to give more authority to the site with all the links it generated.
Sebastien, great resume here, it wraps everything up altogether! The conference was great too 🙂
Actually, we got over 50 000 visitors from the post and keep getting daily traffic every day since it nows ranks for words like “Canadian Restaurants”. Also, the overall traffic of the site increased alot since then as Google started to give more authority to the site with all the links it generated.
Sebastien, great resume here, it wraps everything up altogether! The conference was great too 🙂
Interesting and useful post.
Interesting and useful post.
This doesn’t strike me as SEO but rather as good old fashioned content creation. And isn’t it rather ironic that the ultimate confirmation of “online street cred” is delivered by that number one bastion of the MSM, the New York Times?
This doesn’t strike me as SEO but rather as good old fashioned content creation. And isn’t it rather ironic that the ultimate confirmation of “online street cred” is delivered by that number one bastion of the MSM, the New York Times?
I would say it’s combined great content creation and great content promotion… both leading to an increase in SEO results 😉
I would say it’s combined great content creation and great content promotion… both leading to an increase in SEO results 😉
Pretty good SEM tactic, did you fall on it by accident obviously you want some social traffic 🙂
Pretty good SEM tactic, did you fall on it by accident obviously you want some social traffic 🙂