Social Media Marketing (SMM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) go hand in hand in many ways. When building your strategy, both complement each other so be aware that changes made in either strategy can greatly affect the other. Efforts that focus on integrating social media with SEO have become crucial for any successful digital marketing strategy.
The main thing to keep in mind about this integration is that both revolve around providing the most relevant, practical, interesting, and easy to digest content, and making it available to a larger audience. When that’s accomplished, you’ll notice that the success of one will indirectly affect the success of the other. Below, we will be describing 5 social media practices that can improve discovery of your content via search engines:
OPTIMIZE YOUR SOCIAL CONTENT FOR LISTING BY SEARCH ENGINES
The first page of Google search results often contains relevant social media content, such as YouTube videos, Facebook pages, and so on. This is how you get organic visitors to your website. To get your social media content listed in search results, make sure to include the most relevant keyword phrases in the title and description. Researching what type of social media content is listed by Google in your industry, and then creating engaging social media posts targeting the same keywords is the aim here in order to enable as many people as possible to find and visit your website. An additional advantage of this approach is that these visitors are pre-qualified because they have already engaged with your content, and found it interesting enough to click through to your website.
USE SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS TO IMPROVE SEARCH RANKINGS
A few years ago, the use of back links was considered to be the most powerful tool to boost the ranking of any website. However, since Google figured out that many of those backlinks were not genuine, but rather purchased or artificially generated by marketers, it stopped using them to calculate ranking. Lately, there has been some correlation between mentions of website content on social media and the search ranking of that website. If a certain website, or specific content from that website, gets a lot of attention on social media, then it must be of interest to many people. So it follows that you should generate as much attention around your content on social networks as possible. Either by generating compelling content that’ll ensure high engagement or by promoting your content on social media which will motivate many to re-share and facilitate social sharing which will in return generate links and traffic to boost your website SEO.
PROMOTE ORGANIC LINK BUILDING BY BEING FOUND ON SOCIAL MEDIA
To be discovered and have successful social sharing, it’s important to generate high quality content worth the share and thus improving the chances that people will reference your website with a link. Let’s not forget the time needed to invest in building following on relevant social networks.
USE SOCIAL MEDIA TO BOOST LOCAL SEO
Due to heavy competition, it’s quite tough ranking for high-competition keywords on a national or international level. However, if you’re a business like Cre8mania for example, which has products and services that can be marketed locally as well, you’ll find there are a lot fewer competitors in your local area, and so it’s easier to rank. In all cases, make sure to do 2 things: 1. Include the correct address in the ‘About’ section on your social pages, and refer to your province, state, and city in the description, and 2, include the most important and relevant keyword phrases.
UTILIZE THE SEARCH FUNCTION OF SOCIAL NETWORKS
We all focus on Google but many social networks function as search engines too. Twitter for example, reports more than 20 billion search queries per month. YouTube, 3.7 billion. What should you do? Optimize your social content of course by targeting the keyword phrases that are most often searched on those particular networks. The easiest way to do this is by using the ‘autocomplete’ function of the search box. For example, as you start to type in a search query in YouTube, a number of different phrases are suggested to you. Make a list of all these, and include them regularly in your titles and descriptions. Don’t forget to analyze all the results to identify the best performing keywords, and then boost them further.
In summary, it should be clear that social media provides plenty of opportunities to get your content in front of people searching the web. So make sure you are leveraging the powerful tools offered by social marketing to boost the visibility of your brand in organic search.