Let’s break down how social media helps with an SEO strategy.
Picture this equation throughout this article.
Equation: More Social Visibility = More Links = Higher Rankings.
Makes sense, right?
What is SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)?
The process of optimising a website to gain free, organic, editorial or natural search results through which leads to awareness and traffic. The idea behind SEO is simple – make your website more visible in search engines. In other words, if you rank higher on a page then people will see what’s offered by your site. The higher the website is listed, the more people will see it.
How Can I Use Social Media To Boost My SEO Results?
Social media will help you get your content in front of more people. That can lead to better SEO results, from more backlinks, better engagement signals, and more exposure on search engine result pages for branded search queries.
Understanding both SEO and social media marketing can help companies perform better on both channels. Audience research on social media can help you create more targeted content. SEO research can help you understand what your social audience wants to read.
So, what is the relationship between social media and SEO?
It’s simple, they both help companies achieve their marketing goals.
What Is Social SEO?
Social SEO refers to the use of social media as an indirect tool to increase your search visibility and organic search ranking.
While social media does not directly impact SEO, the social signals (likes, shares, and comments) generated from people sharing your content on social media channels that link back to your website contribute to building trust and customer loyalty, driving brand awareness and exposure, all of which indirectly helps boost your online visibility and traffic.
Ways To Use Social Media To Improve SEO Results
Share new posts on social media to get them indexed quicker:
- Search engines need to index your website before it appears in their list of results. Google finds new content by scanning its existing database. Platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn have a lot of information in their databases. That’s why it’s important to share your content on social media immediately after being published.
- If you’re consistently publishing high-quality content, you establish yourself as an expert within your niche over time. People come to trust the information you provide, and that trust starts to encompass your brand as a whole. More people sharing your content/article/blog means more eyeballs—and more chance of writers quoting your content/article/blog in their own content. This leads to more back linking.
- That’s good news because Google’s evaluation of your website’s authority and trustworthiness plays a huge factor in your search ranking success.
- Social media networks have more people using them than most websites. Almost half of the world’s population uses some kind of social media website. So it would be beneficial for you and your business to acquire some of that attention to establish brand authority.
Establishing brand authority in the digital space:
- Over 50% of brand reputation comes from online sociability
- Companies risk losing 22% of business when potential customers find a negative article on a Google search engine results page (SERP)
- Many people use social media to learn about brands, be educated, and be entertained. This is where a lot of brand reputations are formed. Both Google’s algorithm and real humans look at this when deciding if a website is trustworthy or not. Google’s algorithm tries to give the best, most relevant results for any given term. Websites that have a good reputation are more likely to make the cut than those without.
Social media and SEO can help you establish authority. How? If you’re consistently publishing high-quality content, you establish yourself as an expert within your niche over time. People come to trust the information you provide, and that trust starts to encompass your brand as a whole.
People aren’t constrained to only one digital sphere. They access a variety of different resources every day, which is why omnichannel marketing is such an effective technique to reach consumers no matter where they are. People spend much of their time on social media, and that is where you as a brand want to be a thought leader.
Building your authority puts your content outside of your control because if your domain would shut down or crash for any odd reason, you would still have authority in the market as far as social presence and you can still remain relevant to your audience. This will have a positive impact in other ways – shared content, word-of-mouth marketing, customer reviews, new leads, public forums, organic site traffic.
Here are a few tips & tricks…
Social Media Content Tips & Tricks You Need for SEO
The content you write for your tweets, Facebook posts, and Instagram captions help create an experience for your audience. Your content can be short, but it can help you get more traffic if it meets three requirements:
- It must be engaging, communicating your message in a way that is easy to understand.
- It must provide value to your target audience, making it exciting and memorable.
- It must be optimized to reach more people, which will result in enhancing your SEO results.
You will need to do some background research to ensure you are providing the best value to your target audience.
You will need to use specific keywords when you post on different platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. However, you should not sound too robotic. Try to use clever metaphors and write conversationally. Make sure that your captions will be interesting to both Google and your readers.
On Instagram & Twitter, you can use hashtags to help people find your posts. For example, you could use #LearningSEO or #SEOandSocialMedia #SEOServices. You can also create your own unique hashtags and characters to differentiate yourself so that your content is different and people who are interested in your content can find it easily.
The goal here is to amplify your content distribution as much as you can to get more traffic and brand awareness. This will have more people searching for your website and services.
Influencer marketing:
- This is a great way for expanding your reach and increasing brand awareness. You don’t even need to negotiate with influencers. Simply commenting on their content or tagging them in posts when relevant will show social algorithms that you’re engaged with specific spaces, which gives more exposure of your company’s products/services to people who are interested (and might be potential clients).
- Applying this tactic won’t only increase your following count and engagement; it will also show the search engine’s algorithm that your brand is legitimate when people start googling your brand.
Using UGC for engagement:
- User-Generated Content is a great engagement tactic that costs nothing.
- Enhance content from other users that are aligned with your market, use the content in your own creative way to match your social voice/character.
- 56% of people on social media like to see user-generated content
Search engines are also limited by the challenge of assessing the true identity and authority of social profiles, which makes it difficult for them to know how much value to give a link.
We know that Google doesn’t consider a share on Facebook to be equivalent to a backlink from an authoritative site. But social media does influence SEO in other, less direct but important ways.
Summary
You might be thinking that links to your content on social media are good for SEO, but the number of followers and likes don’t have any effect on your ranking. Right? Google hasn’t said much on the subject in recent years, but by the looks of things, SEO is working with or using social media to increase results on the SERP and maintain brand authority. Your website is your own owned asset, and your social media channels, in addition to serving as separate brand awareness funnels, should also be directing traffic back to your website and complimenting and developing your brand’s reputation and authority, which is critical to SEO success.
Author : Mduduzi Mchunu
