How Social Media Marketing and SEO Work in Unison
Should you pursue social media marketing or SEO strategies? If you’ve struggled with this question, then the good and bad news of it is that these tools work together. While the downside is that you can’t (or shouldn’t) throw in the towel on one and focus on the other, the upside is that you can use these together to benefit each other and boost your business faster.
How are SEO and Social Media Marketing Related?
These strategies work well together because they have a lot in common. Both are organic strategies designed to attract customers with your natural charm and branding. This means they’re also inbound marketing methods that utilize content to draw in visitors.
In short, you’ll have to create quality content for your social media marketing regardless of your other efforts. Enriching this content with well-researched SEO keywords and phrases will get even more visitors, clicks, and, ultimately, customers. This makes your content more worthwhile and gives you a proper place to put all those keywords so Google won’t be knocking you for keyword stuffing and other slights against the search engine gods.
This becomes even more important when you consider the changes that Google made to its algorithm several years ago. After this, marketers had to face the fact that raw like counts on social media posts don’t boost search rankings, which makes SEO’s place in your SMM campaign even more important.
Increasing SEO Impact and Rankings with Social Media Marketing
After understanding the basics of why SEO is important to social media marketing and vice versa, we can look at specific ways to get them to work together. Here are some of the top ways SEO and SMM work together to increase rankings, make sales, and drive the growth of your business:
Build Your Following Organically
While likes alone aren’t enough to boost your search engine ranking, having a large following will. While you can buy proxy followers, Google is hip to this and will judge the authenticity of the people who like your page.
One of the best ways to grow your following the right way is to produce high-quality content that customers and potential customers will want to read and share. Once you have them hooked on your awesome content, it’s important to engage with your followers. Reply to comments, post open-ended questions, enter into discussions, and generally interact with them as if you already know you’re going to have a great relationship. This will help build brand loyalty and give you more opportunities to introduce yourself to more people.
Create Optimized Social Media Posts
As you’re posting great content from the first step, keep in mind that it should also be optimized in a seamless way. The real trick here is to choose keywords and phrases that are timely. Google will put popular social media entries at the top of its search page when a phrase is searched for, but this boost typically only lasts for a short time. Using seasonal keywords, current events and other relevant content is the way to grab this top spot.
Go Local
Search engines love to show consumers local companies. And why wouldn’t they? The last thing you want when you’re looking for a local SEO Toronto company is to get results back for one in Atlanta, Georgia.
You can help the search engines and your business by posting plenty of local content on social media. The easy way to do this is to make sure you post anytime your business is involved in anything local. While it’s best to post pictures you’ve personally taken at community events along with keyword-rich phrases like “Bill’s Burgers, Toronto Days Parade,” you can also post content from local events that you haven’t attended to show Google your connection to the area.
For a more advanced version of this, look into other community leaders, local celebrities, organizers, and business owners and get involved with posting to each other’s social media accounts. Look into guest blogging for a local leader or them writing for you as well.
Grab Inbound Links With Content
Here, again, we’re seeing how keyword-rich content will work with social media to get more exposure. Start with quality content that’s optimized and easy to search for and you’ll have something that will attract links to your site. Attracting a diverse crowd of links will make you seem like more of an authority to Google and help you reach more audiences.
You can maximize the usefulness of your quality content by mentioning it in discussions on your own social media threads or on other forums. Again, this ups your authority and shows you as a leader in your industry.
Encouraging Your Followers to Share Your Posts
Another way to up your authority and get Google to notice you with your optimized social media, is to encourage your followers to share your content. This works much the same way inbound links do in terms of authority and you may end up with more of those as people share your posts.
Encouraging shares is relatively simple and you don’t need to shy away from simply asking people to share. There’s no reason to be sketchy here or try to trick people into sharing. If your content is good enough, followers will want to share regardless of you telling them to anyway.
However, you can get the ball rolling by saying something along the lines of “Want to see more content like this? Like and share it!” or even use some incentive such as running a contest, promising a coupon, or something similar. Some pages will offer an incentive to all their followers if a post gets a certain amount of shares or likes.
In short, SEO and social media work together by maximizing the effectiveness of your quality content, social updates, and posts. Start by creating solid posts that incorporate keywords and phrases then work on getting others to share it and link to it. Even when Google’s rules change on what increases your page ranking (and it will change, it always does), these will remain solid strategies that will help you connect with more followers and potential customers.
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