4 Compelling Ways to Use Social Media and SEO to Help Your Social Media Marketing

By: Jane Danes

Social media and SEO are intertwined. But it’s not difficult to understand why. The former focuses and encourages engagement and real conversations among real people. The latter, on the other hand, focuses on how individuals are finding information and solutions to their issues on the Internet.

Although social media doesn’t cause a direct impact on search ranking, it’s a part of SEO.

How? It’s simply because it puts your brand in front of your audience. It expands your audience as quick as you want it to be. Furthermore, it drives engagement and referral traffic, which can assist your search ranking through natural links.

Then, SEO can help provide a keyword-rich content that’s shared on social media.

But how are you going to use social media and SEO to  your social media marketing strategy?

1. Find relevant keywords through social media

Having high-quality content can drive better visibility on social media. But before you can start creating high-quality content, you must first educate or entertain your target audience. Make sure that your content has relevant keyword phrases.

To search for commonly used keywords that are relevant to your audience, you should try using social media monitoring. These seven tools let you monitor mentions on social media and blogs.

Incorporate keywords in your titles, hashtags, images and social media posts for better visibility.

2. Build links

Inbound links improve search visibility and brand awareness. Links from high-authority domains will signal search engines that your content is valuable.

Promoting your content through social media encourages inbound links to your posts. But your content must be valuable and unique, so bloggers and influencers will find it useful and compel them to link back to your post.

If you want your post to be shared on social media, make sure that it’s an outstanding blog post. Just by sharing exemplary posts, you’re encouraging other bloggers to share them to their readers, thereby, generating valuable incoming links.

3. Boost social media followers

Another way to signal search engines that your content is valuable is to interact with your followers and improve their number. When your followers interact with your post, it shows that your content is valuable and it increases your brand authority. By simply expanding your followers can cause better ranking.

But when you expand your followers, make sure that you don’t pay for them. Instead, improve your audience count organically by real engagement. Quality followers on social media are more likely to engage with your audience. Search engines don’t like fake followers. Google may penalise you for it.

4. Start conversations

By communicating with others, you’re building relationships with an audience online and offline. If you wish your brand to be real, you must start conversations with your followers, participate on Twitter chats, or join Facebook groups. Then, don’t forget to reply to those who made a comment on your post.

Final Thoughts

Even though Matt Cutts explains why Google doesn’t emphasize social media and SEO, experts see that these two factors compliment each other. They also contribute to the overall success of your marketing campaign. They both benefit from each other.