Do you use social media for SEO?
Social media is not just a popular channel for interpersonal connection, entertainment, and business marketing. It’s also a powerful and important platform to enhance your SEO efforts, and it should be part of your overall search engine optimization strategy.
Social media itself is not a Google ranking factor. When adopted as part of your content strategy, however, social media posts that are SEO optimised can improve your rankings, increase your online visibility, and drive traffic to your website or your blog. This occurs through the correlation between your SEO campaign and your social media marketing.
How Does Social Media Enhance SEO Results?
By sharing high-quality links to your social profiles, your brand exposure is dramatically increased. This works to influence your SEO efforts by:
- Improving your online visibility
- Boosting your brand recognition
- Widely distributing your content
- Building your brand’s reputation
- Increasing the lifespan of your posts
- Enhancing your local SEO results
- Maximizing your authority in your niche
When social media users interact with and share your content, this generates social signals that tell Google (and other search engines) that your posts are valued by your target audience. This is an important factor in search engine ranking.
In other words, social media can indirectly influence the Google algorithm to drive high-quality online traffic to your website or blog.
Furthermore, when your fans and followers share your content, they become lead generators on your behalf, advocating for your brand offering.
Some of the most effective social content for SEO includes:
- Images
- Videos
- Infographics
- Blogs
- Podcasts
- Emotive or amusing memes
How Does It Work?
- Post valuable content that is informative, educational, amusing, creative, or inspiring.
- Link your content to your website or blog, use your focus keywords in your posts, and use appropriate hashtags.
- When your followers share your content, you gather new followers while, at the same time, your website/blog generates traffic.
- Your brand’s online community grows.
- Consistent social posting and interaction on your posts build your brand reputation, the authority of your site, and underpin your SEO efforts.
- Your search engine ranks improve (when you have an effective overall SEO strategy in place).
- Your visibility online improves and you elicit more organic, targeted website visits and a higher conversion rate.
Which Social Platform to Use?
Choose one or two social platforms that best suit the type of business you operate and your target audience. For example:
- A professional B2B or marketing company is best served using LinkedIn.
- A brand with a youth focus needs to use TikTok or Snapchat.
- A fashion house or travel company, with image-rich content to share, should use Instagram.
- Facebook is a great all-rounder and the leading social media platform worldwide.
- Twitter or X is easy to use and gets great results.
- Pinterest is good for sharing image-based content and also works as a very effective and entertaining search engine website before making a purchase decision.
Tips for using Social Media for SEO:
- Publish consistently – one post per day per platform is ideal.
- Publish high quality, high value, captivating content.
- Make it easy to share your website and blog (with on-page social buttons).
- Optimize your social profiles and your posts
- Optimize your images in terms of image format, file size, ALT text, captions, and more.
- Engage with your followers
- Track your campaigns and your social interactions
- Partner with an SEO expert to assist with social media management for SEO.
Social media posts for SEO differ from social media for direct marketing purposes – which is why working with an experienced SEO professional can be so helpful.
SEOcycle is a Sydney-based web design and SEO company with a focus on providing economical SEO for sole traders, small businesses, and medium-sized business clients. We work with clients locally, throughout NSW, nationwide, and internationally to help them rank highly in Google search engine results pages and get seen online. Among the services we offer is affordable social media management for SEO.
Contact us today to have a chat about how we can help your business grow and succeed.
