Although social media signals aren’t a ranking factor, social media can help boost your brand visibility in search results. That’s why it’s no longer an “either you use social media or SEO” kind of thing. For businesses to succeed in the online visibility game, they need to integrate social media into their SEO efforts.
Learn what you need to know about social media SEO to get your brand in front of as many people as possible for business success.
What Is Social Media SEO?
Social media SEO is the process of leveraging social media to better attract potential customers through search. You can use social media to indirectly enhance your SEO. After all, with social media, you can:
Indirectly boost organic search engine rankings through branded searches: If people see your brand regularly on social media, they’ll likely search for your brand on Google and go to your site. By leveraging branded traffic, you can enjoy higher organic search rankings. After all, your content will be seen as a more authoritative result for those branded keywords than the content of others.
Occupy more SERPs real estate: Social media profiles can also appear in search results pages with high SEO rankings.
Drive on-site engagement: Social posts can drive traffic to your website. The resulting on-site engagement may help boost your SEO. After all, Google pays close attention to those signals that show that users are happy (or unhappy) with a website.
Enhance backlinking efforts: Social media can help your brand content go viral. When that happens, you can get the attention of authoritative websites, which may just link to your original website content. These valuable backlinks are a ranking factor.
Ultimately, thanks to this increase in online presence, brands that leverage social media SEO can easily edge out the competition through increased brand awareness and conversion rates.
Creating an Effective Social Media SEO Strategy
To get the most of social media and SEO, follow these tips as part of your social media SEO strategy:
1. Optimize Your Social Profiles
Since your social profiles can show up in search engine results pages, you want to make sure they’re optimized. You’d only waste that added SERP real estate for your brand if your profiles are incomplete. Besides, your social profiles are a great way to direct traffic to your site.
To optimize your social profiles, make sure you complete your profile bio with relevant information. Also, include a high-quality profile picture in your social media accounts. Although this can practically be any image, for businesses like yours, your best bet is your logo for brand recognition.
Don’t forget to include your contact information, including your website, which should link to your homepage. This may also help your SEO if visitors decide to stay on your site and engage.
2. Use Niche Keywords and Hashtags
When creating content for social media, incorporate the terms users employ when making relevant search queries. Use of these keywords will help boost your brand’s discoverability, not just on the social platform but also, potentially, even in search engine results pages. You can leverage your SEO keyword research findings to optimize your social media content with the relevant keywords.
Hashtags are just as important for content visibility. Hashtags help boost your social media efforts by ensuring your content reaches a massive audience. Just make sure you don’t overdo it. The general recommendation is to use up to five relevant hashtags per post as part of your social media marketing. The more people your content reaches, the higher the chances of it generating social shares, comments, and likes and becoming viral. We already know how viral content can help boost your SEO indirectly.
To ensure your social content reaches even more people, make sure you boost your Facebook, X and Instagram followers prior to content creation. You want to also take advantage of the fact that a single social media post typically reaches every member of your social network.
3. Promote Website Content on Social Media
This is a great strategy to drive traffic to your website and generate on-site engagement that may boost SEO. Plus, when you promote your site content on your social media sites, you increase the chances of it becoming viral. As I mentioned earlier, viral content can catch the attention of authoritative sites, which may decide to go to your website and link to your original content, again helping your SEO.
When promoting your website content on your social media channels, don’t just copy and paste it directly onto your social media post. Repurpose your blog post so that it’s tailored to a target audience on social media that generally values brevity and visual content. Besides, for purposes of social media SEO, the idea is to get social media users–including administrators of authority websites—to your site. You won’t be able to do that if you copy-paste your entire content on social media from the get-go. Just use enough of your original material to pique people’s curiosity. This way, they’ll want to check out the relevant content themselves. Include a link to your high-quality content in your social media post so they can easily do just that. Make sure to use a compelling CTA to boost click-through rates.
4. Maintain Branding Consistency
This isn’t a social media SEO strategy per se. However, it’s a tip worth mentioning to ensure the effectiveness of all your social media SEO tactics. After all, the goal of social media SEO is to boost your brand’s overall online visibility. But if people can’t recognize it’s actually the same brand across these different platforms, what’s the point?
So, make sure all your social media platforms and website have the same look and feel. If you generate a domain name for your site that reflects your brand personality, use it as your social media URL as well.
Use the same logo and brand colors throughout your social sites and web design as well. All your content should also employ the same language tone.
This way, if, let’s say, a user clicks that social media post link and goes to your site, they won’t feel like they just landed on the wrong place and leave. Instead, they’ll stay for long, boost your engagement rates, and help you reap those SEO benefits you had aimed for in the first place.
Conclusion
Although social media and SEO are separate entities, they can work hand in hand to help boost every business’s visibility.
The key is to know how to leverage social media SEO the right way. You learned tips you should follow for this.
Optimize your social media profiles, use niche target keywords and strategic hashtags, and promote your site content on social media. As a final tip, maintain branding consistency to ensure brand recognition across multiple platforms.
With an effective social media SEO strategy, you can maximize the use of two powerful channels and easily beat the competition.
Author bio: Nico is the founder of Launch Space. The company works with enterprise SaaS clients, helping them scale lead generation globally across EMEA, APAC, and other regions. When not strategizing growth, he enjoys building practical tools like the Domain Name Generator.