In the current online marketing scenario, SEO and Social Media are two faces of the same coin where one can’t exist successfully without the other. Online marketers practice them to meet same ends; increase online visibility, improve brand reputation and improve business deliverable. Both are organic and inbound strategies, that are intended to attract maximum visitors to your website naturally.
Most successful businesses use social media and search engine optimization in conjunction with each other and those which have their SEO and social media working in silos are missing out on the bigger picture. Social media is dependent on high quality content and strong brand presence, which are already an integral part of SEO, and therefore, the efforts that your spend on SEO can highly improve your social media outreach, which in turn will reward you with higher search rankings.
Useful Resource: Wiki page of SEO (Search engine optimization) & SMO (Social media optimization).
However, there is still widely prevalent confusion as to how social media really helps improve your Google search rankings. Most search marketers wouldn’t care to go into details leaving the social media guys wondering whether whatever they are doing is contributing to effective marketing. To solve this problem, here are listed five effective ways in which social media should be making your SEO efforts more productive. These tips do not promote a particular social media channel. They are just highly specific.
Grow your Followers, Increase your Page Likes
The total number of followers for your social media account will always have the maximum influence on your rankings. A small business with a following of a tiny group of non descriptive individuals on Twitter or a Facebook page that has a handful of likes will always remain behind a mega-corporation which has a well maintained social media account with a million Facebook likes and thousands of Twitter followers in Google search rankings. That doesn’t mean quantity is everything. Google has the intelligence to detect any foul play, such as buying proxy followers.
It will take long before you have a large and loyal following but perseverance and consistency helps. If you maintain a consistent tone throughout all your posts and update your fans on a regular basis. Useful articles, tips, motivational quotes, funny memes should present the user with variety and information simultaneously.
Recommended reading: 7 Ways to Create the Most Shared & Engaging Website
Increase your inbound links from external social media
Social media helps search rankings as it increases inbound links to your content. Social media enables other sites to link to your content and the greater the diversity of the links the better for your Google search rankings. Prior to that you should have a high quality, authoritative content, otherwise you won’t be able to attract links.
Here social media is acting as a broadcast channel where social channels bait your content for other sites to link back to your own site. Hashtags is an easy way to gain visibility.
Optimizing posts for search
In addition to your web page content, Google also takes into account the popular social media updates in the top section of its SERPs. Therefore, it makes sense to optimize your social media posts for maximum visibility search engine algorithm. The first step in this series is to have a strong anchor for the post, which might include an infographic or a video or a link to an in-depth article. Follow it by framing your post around a specific search query. For instance, if you are sharing an article about the types of photography jobs, you can share the post with a specific query such as “Do you love photography? How about pursuing a photography job?”
Recommended reading: How to Increase Social Media and Organic Visitors
Increasing social media engagement
The role of social engagement in increasing the brand authority is similar to external links. Google and other search engines look for external factors that validate your brand or your content and social sharing is one of these factors. If a group of five people share your Facebook post, but if there are a thousand people doing the same, nothing like that. The best part of this strategy is that you only have to put efforts for generating initial momentum. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle and the more people share your content, the more followers you will win.
While social media is considered as more of a brand tool, there is a significant SEO advantage associated with it, which can only be realized if marketers work on it as a tightly interwoven strategy.
This article is written by Saurabh Tyagi. He is a writer, digital enthusiast and career expert, all in one. This article is commentary on search engine optimization and its best practices. This post has been written keeping in mind SEO enthusiasts and professionals applying to jobs in SEO or social media. Follow him on LinkedIn.
