Social media marketing tools are the same regardless of what you are promoting. The good news is that the SEO techniques you use on your website may be easily transferred over to your social media campaigns. What differs is the content itself and how you apply those different SEO techniques.
Every marketer is doing their best to succeed in social media marketing but only a few of them understand how to make SEO and social media marketing meet. Google has been particularly elusive about how its rankings are influenced by social media content. That being said, industry professionals have found, universally, that highly engaged content has much greater SEO value than less popular pages do. This finding makes sense given that Google’s algorithms are designed and are constantly being updated to find and rank the most high-quality, useful content for each search query.
Search engines take into account social signals in determining the quality of content because they represent consumer assessments of the content on a given page. Social media engagement essentially provides Google with external validation of a page’s value which means that social media marketing and search engine optimization work hand in hand. What works well for one works for the other.
We’d like to help you find success in your social marketing SEO efforts. So, here are some techniques you can use to facilitate your rise through the social media search engines.
Post High Quality and Post Frequently
Always opt for posting very high-quality content but especially if you can’t produce and post content as frequently as your competition. Consider YouTube success, Lemmino. The videos posted on this site take over a month to produce a video but they are of such high quality that the content receives hundreds of thousands of views on every publishing day.
Successful marketers agree that the posting frequency greatly affects their social media presence. Keep in mind that for you to be able to make it big in the social media world, you have to keep your audience engaged. The more frequently you post on your accounts, the higher the engagement will be because if your audience doesn’t see your brand often, they will eventually lose interest and look for another brand to follow.
Keywords
Social media channels are search engines too, so it is wise to treat them as such. The use of keywords is the first website SEO technique you should transfer to your social media practices. Social media search engines promote posts based on how quickly they become popular, but they still need help to be able to find your posts. As you would with website content, simply pick the most relevant keywords you can find and add them to your social content. You can use them on your page, product description, articles, and anything else Google needs to know what to look for.
While keyword stuffing is often a concern on your website pages or blog articles, there really is no limit to how many keywords you add to social content. Imagine the combinations of words people might type into a search engine in order to find your posts. For example, newlyweds looking for content about how to save money might type in words like, “how to save for the future” or “how to save for kids’ college before they’re even born.”
See our article for more about keyword strategies:
It’s Time to Reevaluate Your SEO Keyword Strategies
Funny, Educational, Sexy, and Secrets
People are highly likely to view, review, and share funny posts. Educational content typically enjoys high levels of engagement. Pouty lips, sexy clothing, muscles, and so on get lots of views, too. And, of course, insider information gets shares as secrets quickly un-become secrets. Finding ways to integrate this type of content whether through memes, short videos, or witty comments can help boost your social media content. Of course, it’s always best to keep things relevant to your line of business.
Images Are One of the Strongest SEO Techniques
Social media posts with images are destined to be more successful than posts with images. The fact is that images draw people’s attention. As we mentioned above, though, be sure that your image directly relates to the text on your social media post. Some people may click your link based on the image without ever looking at the text you added to your social media post and will be disappointed and disillusioned if they are taken to content completely unrelated to the image. This practice will increase your page bounce rates so be sure to use images that set expectations that are consistent with your landing page.
Increase Positive Brand Mentions
If a brand that is currently unrecognized by Google starts getting a lot of mentions online, it could cause Google to view them as an entity or a unique person, place, thing, or concept that deserves attention. How people talk about your brand online and on social media platforms can impact what terms you rank for. Online mentions can help search engines see you as relevant for queries with similar terminology. The best way to encourage positive mentions on your brand in various public forums is through good, old-fashioned, hard work. Grow your audience by providing engaging, value-added content and positively reinforce any interactions your social media content receives by liking, commenting on, or thanking your followers for their response to your social feed.
Stay Current with Social Media and Google SEO Rules
Google and other search engines have slowed down on how often they issue rule changes compared to years past. That being said, the increased sophistication of the technology being used has made if more difficult to manipulate search engines as well. Instead of trying to beat the system by spamming popular keywords, and so on, you’ll find it pays to simply stay up to date with current SEO rules for both Google and social media.
Conclusion
When you learn to do something, you aren’t instructed on individual components of the task without seeing the big picture of how everything fits together. You learn to combine all of the parts and pieces into a single process that you undertake from start to finish in order to complete the task. Similarly, you can’t pick and choose which SEO components you employ.
Post High Quality
Post Frequently
Focus on Keyword Usage
Integrate Funny, Educational, or Sexy Content (when relevant!)
Use Images (again, relevant!)
Increase Brand Mentions
Stay Current
Your brand should be testing and re-testing all of the available SEO resources available to you.
This type of dedication to social media campaigns may feel like a resource drain for a new or smaller business, but it is worth the time and effort. The benefits certainly outweigh the drain on your resources in regards to improving your social media effectiveness.
The experts at Strategy Driven Marketing work hard to stay on top of the shifting world of SEO. We’re ready to meet you where you are and help you get to the next level. Whether you are in need of a social media revamp, a new website, or have an established site in need of redesigning we’d love to help. Contact us today to learn more about what we can do to help you best optimize all of your online efforts for search engine rankings. Let’s get started!