Brand reputation management is probably the most common reason that agencies track social media mentions for their clients. And in-house professionals often use social media networks for community building. But have you considered using Raven’s Social Monitor to help with your long-term SEO link building campaign?

Houston-based SEO consultant Sean Dolan found a way to do just that, and it paid off big time for his client. Read more about his creative technique and the results:

Your company: Ascendgence, LLC

Your client: Office furniture manufacturer

What was your client’s initial problem?

Our client was a brand new business, entering a market that was dominated for years by two major competitors. Before signing with Ascendgence, our client was grossing about $2,000 per month in online sales. They wanted more sales.

What was your initial strategy for solving your client’s problem?

I began by gathering a complete understanding of their product’s market, brainstorming all current or potential uses of the product and identifying all hubs where the conversation was conducive for introducing my client’s product. I chose a long-term strategy of creating a white-hat backlink profile that would last. To do that, I needed to find where the conversations about my client’s product were occurring online, identify who was influential in these circles and create relationships with these individuals.

How did you use Raven to help you carry out your strategy?

In order to stay on top of online mentions of the product, I used the Social Monitor tool in Raven. The Social Monitor tool is most often used for brand monitoring, but at the time, my client’s product had zero brand awareness. It was my job to create it. So, I used the Social Monitor tool to monitor the product instead of the brand. Instead of monitoring the term “MacBook Pro,” I monitored the type of product, “laptop.”

How did you set up the Social Monitor?

Here’s how to set up the Social Monitor to track product names:

1. Click on the “Social” primary tab.
2. Click on the “Monitor” secondary tab.
3. Enter Keyword Phrase. Enter the name people call your product (in my client’s case, it was not the brand name).
4. Enter Search Name. This allows you to customize the title.
5. Check “Yes” for “Send Update Alerts.”
6. Click “Add Search.”

Once you click “Add Search,” you will see your Social Monitor has been created:

Once I set up social monitoring with update alerts, I received notifications when my client’s product type was mentioned.

How did you identify potential product reviewers?

I viewed each of the social mentions and separated out those I believed were the most ideal to solicit a link from. The product is a piece of office furniture, and I found that blogs discussing home offices, DIY design, gifts for geeks, interior design or office design were more willing to review the product.

From the social mentions, I added the links with the most potential to the Raven Link Manager tools and labeled them as “queued” so that I could keep track of them moving forward.

The contact information from each of these bloggers was added to the Contacts section of my Raven Account.

I sent out review requests regularly as these opportunities came in. Many times I would engage in e-mail correspondence for weeks or months before getting a review, but in my experience, the harder it is to get the link, the harder it is for my competition to duplicate it. Soon enough, I not only generated high quality links from blogs with lots of link juice, but these reviews were posted on blogs with readers who were highly interested in my client’s product.

One blogger contact ranked No. 1 at the time for my target keyword. He wasn’t selling the product; he was a passionate hobbyist who knew everything about the product. He didn’t review the product, but in our conversations he offered up a list of most common questions that his readers asked him about the product. I quickly put up a page on my client’s site answering their question with visual aides, and he instantly displayed the link on his site for his readers. Shortly after, I outranked him for this term. And to date, he is my client’s No. 1 source of non-search referral traffic.

What was the result?

The end result, to date: the client is ranking No. 1 and No. 2 for the two most valuable keywords in that market, and their online sales grew from $2,000 per month to $90,000 per month and continues to grow.

Sean Dolan is the co-founder and COO of PPC management and Houston SEO firm Ascendgence. When he’s not busy working or advocating for the homeless, Sean spends his spare time with his wife and children. You can connect with Sean on Twitter.