22 Oct Is There a Relationship between SEO and Social Media?

You may be inclined to believe that SEO practices only apply to websites, not social media — and vice versa. However, it is true that social media can help improve your SEO practices for your website, and your SEO strategy can help your social media presence — kind of. SEO and social media thrive in a symbiotic relationship in which they indirectly influence each other.

While a social media presence does not directly help SEO in terms of ranking higher on Google and other search engines — since search engines only index websites — it can help expand your brand’s reach and increase web traffic by sharing links to your website on your social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Effective digital marketing efforts are well-rounded, using a combination of SEO strategies and social media marketing in order to achieve the best results. It’s no wonder that the websites that rank high on Google also often have an effective social media presence.

In order to reap the full benefits, it’s important to fully understand the relationship between SEO and social media.

Understanding Your Audience

Keyword research is still a crucial aspect of any SEO strategy, although the methods for effectively researching SEO keywords continue to evolve even today. You can focus on all the possible keywords related to your business, but it won’t produce the results you need by spreading your content focus too thin.

Choosing primary keywords requires thinking like a consumer searching for your business online. What is their purpose? What specific words might they use to find your business, as opposed to your competitors? What are others saying about your business online?

Social media is a great tool to help you tune in to what your audience needs, wants, or is searching for online. This tracking technique is called social listening. Now instead of guessing what keywords, phrases, and content you think your audience wants, you can actually know! There are tools that can help you manage your social listening. However, a small business can simply see what their followers and competitors’ followers are saying on social media platforms, which can be even more fine-tuned with the help of following relevant hashtags on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Once you have gained a better understanding of your audience with the help of social media, you can provide web content that is more relevant to your audience’s interests. This will lead to an increase in web traffic with the use of more specific SEO keywords, which will also lead to a higher ranking on Google and other search engines.

The Power of Backlinks

Aside from keywords, backlinks are another essential element to building your SEO strategy. You can improve your ranking on Google by equally improving the quantity and quality of your backlinks from other websites.

Social media provides a great avenue for earning backlinks. Your website can earn backlinks from social media when other users share your content, when it has a high level of engagement from both followers and non-followers, and when other content creators such as influencers or bloggers take notice. This will build your credibility as your content is circulated, and it will lead to other content creators citing it as a resource for their own content — thus created backlinks.

Backlinks show Google and other search engines that your site provides relevant, trustworthy content to other users and should therefore appear high up on search engine results. So don’t just keep your content to your website — be sure to share it often on social media!

Making Sure Your Content Is High Quality

Despite social media engagement being such a high priority for brands online, engagement rates can be very difficult to boost. After all, users are constantly bombarded with content vying for their attention on social platforms. You won’t see engagement on social media unless you provide content that moves your audience to take action — whether that be “liking,” commenting, sharing, or visiting your website. Social media engagement is the key to growing your social media presence and overall web presence — thus boosting your SEO efforts.

So, what should you do to keep your audience engaged on social media?

It all stems from providing high quality content. With the limited nature of social media, though, you will need to take some extra steps to give your audience a reason to be curious or want to learn more about your content. Both your actual website content and your social media content to promote your web content need to be high-quality.

Optimize your social media content by taking the following measures.

• Providing more than just the title — Generally, just the title of a blog post, article, or web page isn’t enough on its own to entice users to engage. Boost your social media engagement by providing an interesting quote from the content, sharing relevant and credible statistics, offering a solution to a problem your audience faces, or straight up telling your audience briefly what they will take away from your content. Users want to know what’s in it for them, after all.
  
• Optimizing images — People are visual by nature, which is why you need to instantly capture your audience’s attention on social media by making the most of your images. Users shouldn’t have to guess what you are trying to convey with your pictures or graphics. Rather, they should both instantly recognize your brand and have a fair idea about the topic of your content. Innovate when it comes to visualizing text like quotes or statistics, implement movement with GIFs and videos, show off the real voice and image of your content creators, and try telling a story that speaks to the interests of your audience and how those interests connect to your brand.
  
• Embracing whitespace — Every social media platform has different limits to how many text characters you can provide, but that doesn’t mean you have to use up every single space with text. Give your readers some visual space that will also make your content more uniquely stand out by tastefully using emojis in place of numbers or bullet points for lists, providing your most important content towards the beginning of extended or threaded posts (especially for Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn), and close off your posts with only a few relevant hashtags curated by your social listening practices.

Improve SEO and Social Media with Digital Marketing Experts

Navigating the vast landscape of social media platforms for effective social media marketing can be difficult. When accomplished effectively, however, social media can be a valuable asset to your SEO strategy and overall brand image.

Ensure your business climbs the ranks on search engine rankings and reaches your audience on social media with the help of our digital marketing experts with Virtual Stacks Systems UK through our SEO services and social media marketing plans! Contact us today to discuss the digital marketing needs of your business.