The power of social media is immense in the current digital era. Not only does it help you build a network of infinite proportions but also, in case of businesses, strengthens your market presence. You reach your target audience faster and more efficiently, become more open to their queries/demands and you can even look forward to molding your reputation the way you intend. On the other hand, there is SEO. If you manage to show up in the top search results repeatedly, you keep gaining more mindshare with each potential customer. Now, what exactly brings these two tools together as one effective digital marketing strategy?
The Importance of Social Media in SEO
There are several studies that prove a correlation between social media shares and search engine rankings. Although social media can’t directly boost SEO rankings, it certainly provides opportunities that enable you to boost them. Let’s take a look at a few of these opportunities.
1. Link Building
Quality backlinks are key to ranking higher on the top search engines. The fact that social media makes way for easy content promotion is key to link building. While social sharing increases the number of inbound links to your site, it also enhances your credibility and popularity. For example, when a post goes viral on Twitter, it also helps the search engines to understand how credible your website is. This influences how they rank your site as per the relevant key phrases. Also, social media encourages more external sites to link to your content.
2. Boosting Brand Awareness
While you work towards improving your social media presence and brand image online, it has a ripple effect leading to improved SEO rankings. Once your content begins to impress your target audience, there will be more followers and more people searching for your brand name online. Moreover, even if your potential customers/clients do not click on any ads you may run, they might be inclined towards looking you up by using your brand as a keyword.
3. Social Media as A Search Engine
It is interesting to see how these networking platforms are constantly under transformation. From being entertaining platforms of communication, these sites have evolved into sources of obtaining quick information in more ways than one. If you are familiar with the concept of hashtags, you would understand how important your social handles are in boosting your SEO visibility too. The key is to stay up to date with the most trending social hashtags that are relevant to your business. The more you incorporate these hashtags in your social posts, the more likely it is that your posts will gain higher reach and engagement. It is also interesting to note that using social media for analyzing the most popular hashtags can prove to be a great keyword search as well. After all, effective SEO is all about finding demand based on search. And hashtags tell you a lot about what people want to read or watch. You can use the same keywords in other online marketing material to further enhance SEO visibility.
The Relation between Social Media & SEO Ranking Signals
Did you know that the time spent by users on your website affects your SEO rankings? The length of each interaction on your site is taken into account by the top search engines like Google & Bing. That in turn affects the ranking algorithm automatically. So, if the content you share on social media is interesting, attractive, crisp and relevant, it would continue to intrigue users and compel them to visit your site more often and spend more time on it. After all, the goal of SEO is to generate relevant traffic and that can happen best when your social media game is on point.
Importance of SEO in Enhancing your Social Performance
If you can monitor how your social media visitors engage with your website, it becomes easier to SEO and social media together. There are various schema that you can implement on the pages that you are trying to rank. These could range from microdata to Javascript. It is also crucial to strengthen your technical SEO as this will help your social performance and tracking.
Optimizing Your Social Media for SEO Purposes
To make these amazing tools to work together & fuel your digital marketing strategies, you must think logically, be aware of the trends and improvise as you go.
1. Make Your SEO Content Social Media Friendly
Every time you create new content for your target audience, it is important to ensure that it can be optimized for a variety of platforms. Whether it is a video, an image or a blog post, the content should be visually appealing as that is what draws users in. Things shouldn’t be too heavy and you could also experiment with snippets of the entire post. The idea is to make the content reach more people, grab their interest and convince them to visit your website and learn more about your business.
2. Use Each Tool to Support the Other
The best way to optimize the potential of SEO and social media together is to use one to promote the other. This two-pronged strategy allows you to target more than one set of audience on more than one platform. You must cross-promote and share the content on social media and SEO channels alike. There are many ways to go about it. For example, you can embed social media posts with your blog posts and articles. You can also include sidebars or icons on your blog that makes it easier for people to locate and follow you on several social media channels. You can outsource SEO services as well as your social media management to skilled and experienced professionals. That would further ensure that the right steps are taken towards improving your visibility and reach.
Bottom Line
SEO & Social Media Platforms can prove to be Excellent Tools for Brand marketing when used Together
Social media is all about engaging with people and at the core of any business that is what you want even in the real, non-virtual world. You just need to follow the basic steps of creating awesome content, engaging the audience based on their interests and then, leveraging that engagement to increase your popularity and search engine rankings at the same time. Not only can you retarget your regular visitors but also, attract new ones that stay loyal to you in the long run.
