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Do you have several popular social media profiles and you want to learn how to use them to boost your SEO campaign? In this article, we will teach you how you can improve your SEO and Google search rankings by including professional SEO services in your content strategy.
The relationship between search engine optimization (SEO) and social media has been a subject of debate for a while now. While these are two different concepts, they are undeniably interconnected. SEO social media optimization refers to how the activity on your social media accounts can contribute to drive traffic to your website. A wide number of social media platforms can be used to improve the effectiveness of your SEO. Curious about the best apps, sites, and activities to include in your SEO strategy in 2021? Keep on reading!
What Is SEO for Social Media?
Just how important are social networks in website promotion? We at Direct Line Development know from experience that social signals can have an obvious influence on a site's search engine ranking. Social signals are the actions of users on social networks, such as comments, views, likes, reposts, and more with links leading to your site. Search engines keep a keen eye on this factor and take it into account when assessing websites and ranking them in search results.
Likes
Google has admitted to giving weight to links that people share on the public pages of social media accounts. Social network activity metrics indicate how relevant or interesting your content is to the users.
Reposts
Reposts are an even more effective social signal - especially if they come from "big" users with a large number of real followers. Search engines pay attention to this indicator, therefore, on sites with a strong promotion strategy. We often see social media widgets next to website content with a call to share the material.
Account Activity and Traffic
Search bots are well aware of how “dead” groups and pages in social networks differ from live and active ones. A high-quality account or group not only pleases subscribers with regular posts but is also an important source of traffic due to clicks on published links. Social widgets installed on site pages make a significant contribution to increasing the audience of social accounts and maintaining user activity.
How Does Social Media Help SEO?
You may be wondering about exactly how social media boosts SEO. Put simply, social media amplifies your website content. If you put out high-quality content that is clicked, liked, shared, and discussed, you’ll get more eyes on your site. It’s possible that this could generate more backlinks as well. Ultimately, social media should be a key part of your larger marketing effort even though it has a less tangible effect on SEO than other strategies. Let’s take a closer look at how SEO and social media interact with each other.
Ways to Improve SEO Ranking Signals with Social Media
Having an active company account on the social media platforms that are popular with your customers will help spread your content faster. Also, the credibility and popularity of the account increases the importance of the links leading from it.
Direct Line's recommendation: Do not forget to regularly update information on your social media accounts, publish new posts, and insert links to websites.
Links From Social Networks Drive Traffic To The Website
Posts with high-quality content get more likes, shares, and comments, and therefore, more people see them. An engaging text will stimulate users to follow the link to your site. The attracted social traffic, in turn, will improve the behavioral characteristics of the website, which directly affects the rankings in SERP. Moreover, you can get website visitors who may convert into leads.
Direct Line’s recommendation: Use every opportunity to share content from your site on social networks. This will increase the activity on your page and bring potential leads to your website.
Social Media Page Profiles Can Appear in SERP As Often as the Website Itself
If you enter a brand query into the search, it is highly likely that you will see a social network page in one of the leading positions, along with the main site. Therefore, if you keep posting across your social networks, you can keep the entire SERP occupied by your brand. Wherever the user clicks, he will see your brand. Sometimes, this can help knock out competitors' pages or negative information about your company from the top-ten page.
Direct Line’s recommendation: Make sure your social media profiles are up-to-date, updated regularly, and similar in appearance to your website.
You Can Get Links from Social Media
High-quality links remain a very important ranking factor up to this day. Many bloggers and content creators look for information on social networks. This is when the link opportunity comes into the picture. By posting high-quality content on your social accounts, people can share it or refer to it on their websites, making a natural backlink that leads to one of your pages.
Direct Line’s recommendation: The higher the quality of the content you produce and publish on social media, the more likely you are to get a backlink. Try to post according to your visitors’ needs as this will encourage users to share your post.
Behavioral Factors Play a Role
Here’s another thing you need to know about SEO social media marketing. Behavioral factors seriously affect the position of your website in the search results. If a user spends a lot of time reading most of the content presented on the page or even returns to the page, it means that they are satisfied with the content. This signals to Google that your content was useful.
As a rule, a person who comes from a social network is much better prepared for the content. Usually, a post on social media contains a preview and a short description of the material or product posted on the site. This post is seen mainly by an audience that is either subscribed to the page or interested in the topic. Such users have a better idea of what awaits them on the site and, therefore they spend more time on the resource, studying the pages more carefully, and often returning to them.
Direct Line’s recommendation: If you’ve added a new product, article, or any other content on the website, make a post on your social platforms to inform your subscribers. This way, your new page will start to rank more highly.
Want Your Content to Index Faster? Post, Post, and Post!
The popularity of some websites is based on having a proper SEO strategy that includes the usage of social media. To speed up the indexing of your content, place as many posts as you can: announce the release of a new article, post links to the site on the profile, and describe the content of the new article in the post briefly.
Direct Line’s recommendation: If you want to promote your content, don’t forget to add keywords and a link to your website to all of your posts on social media.
What is More Important: SEO or Social Media?
It’s pretty much impossible to say whether SEO or social media is more important. Each strategy has benefits and drawbacks so the best way to ensure that your digital marketing efforts are successful is to use both. SEO social media marketing boosts engagement and brings new readers and traffic to your website. SEO makes that content accessible to search engines.
| SEO | Social Media | |
| Content | If you want your content to get out there and rank high in search engine results, focus on SEO. However, it must also be research-based and audience-oriented. The best content answers your potential customers’ questions and provides concise yet detailed information about your product. | Active users of social media want content that not only entertains, but engages them on an emotional level. Therefore, content that evokes an emotional response has a bigger chance to trend. |
| Audience | Make sure you have a clear idea about what your target audience consists of so you can tailor content on your website for them. This takes time and research, but will ultimately pay off. | Social media provides detailed insights into the demographics of who your followers are and allows you to target this specific niche. |
| Success Rate | SEO magic does not happen overnight. You’ll likely need months or even years to get a boost for the most competitive keywords and Google and other search engines take a while to crawl and index your page. SEO can be highly rewarding when you do it right. | SM too requires strategizing and working out ways to increase your outreach. However, it is perhaps the best way to engage your target audience and increase your chances of being found and noticed online. One major challenge is that each post has a short shelf life since new content is posted rapidly from rival companies and individuals. |
What Does SEO Stand for in Social Media?
If we talk about the importance of different SEO strategies for social media profiles, we need to discuss the advantages of using SEO in social media.
Using some strategies, you can achieve different results. For example:
- increasing the level of trust in a product/brand or company;
- neutralizing negative opinions about the product/brand or the reputation of the company;
- expanding the circle of potential buyers;
- effective conversion of subscribers to buyers;
- high targeting;
- high speed of information dissemination within the network;
- low promotion price compared to other advertising means;
What Can Social Media Do for SEO?
Social networks have become bigger than ever before. We go online not only to chat with friends, but we also want to learn the latest news and shop. Entrepreneurs also use SNS platforms as a powerful traffic source.
Website promotion on social networks is a special type of promotion because it involves several large tasks at once. On the one hand, you need to prepare a website for social media users. On the other, you need to optimize your profile, think about the content you will publish, and decide on specific promotion methods. It sounds difficult, but businesses today cannot do without promotion on social platforms.
Preparing a Website for Social Media Users
As it is with SEO, when working with social media, it is important to prepare a website for an audience coming from social platforms. This is called SMO - social media optimization. This term refers to website optimization for social networks.
In this case, you need separate landing pages that would serve as a destination for people who come from Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms. Such a page should not only complement the information that brought the user to the site but also gives them the choice of goods and services. For targeted advertising from social media, a separate landing page is a must. It is important to attach analytics tools to such a page, set goals, and optimize them for mobile.
There are technical ways to optimize these landing pages for social media users.
Share Buttons
On every page, you need to add Share buttons for different platforms. Copying a page URL, opening your profile, pasting the URL into a post and publishing is much more difficult than just clicking the button you want. You need to make it as easy as possible for users to share your content.
Social Widgets
A widget is a small graphic block on a website that shows the latest posts from certain SEO social media accounts. It will help turn random users who came to your site from search into subscribers on your social networks. They will see public news and receive notifications about your events meaning you get leads from passing users. Through the widget, users can subscribe to your group, share a link, or check out the latest page news.
The Open Graph and Twitter Card Tags
Open Graph is an Internet protocol that standardizes the use of metadata to structure information on a page and turn it into a graphic object. It allows for rich previews that make your links more attractive.
The main tags are:
- og: title - indicates the title of the page;
- og: description - gives a short description of the article;
- og: image - shows which picture will be displayed in the post as the main one;
- og: url - sets the canonical URL of the page.
The repost of a page with Open Graph may be familiar to you. It looks like this:
The same goes for Twitter Cards, but there are several advantages over regular tweet links:
- When reposting a page from a Twitter Card, you can add more text than a regular tweet;
- You can attach not only pictures but also gifs, video, and audio files.
Optimize Your Social Accounts
Any social network has a built-in search engine. This is how we search for something on Facebook, Instagram, and so on. The search results on social networks are influenced by the same factors as in the search engines. These include page optimization and social metrics such as likes, shares, number of subscribers, and comments. SEO social media optimization involves adding keywords to the name of the page, its description, and posts.
Use Hashtags
Search by hashtags also works in social networks. If you correctly approach their selection, they will help you bring your posts to the top of results for a particular topic. Like keywords, hashtags are divided by frequency and content (brand / personal, geographic, niche, virality).
Among the main rules for using hashtags:
- Add only relevant tags to your posts.
- Do not use high-frequency generalized tags like #lifestyle, #me or #food. Your posts will simply get lost among other posts.
Encourage Your Clients to Tag Your Page
You can offer a discount to customers who leave a review about you on social networks, post a photo with your hashtag, or tag your page in their post. If the review is negative, you can think of a way to change the customer’s opinion. For example, you may respond to the person and offer them a special service. Your interaction will be seen by this person's friends and followers, and if you leave a good impression of yourself, they may follow you too.
Communicate with Customers on Social Media
Be sure to pay attention to posts, users’ mentions, and tags. Answer questions, say thanks for good reviews, and acknowledge and empathize with customers who have negative things to say. Avoid responding in a similarly negative way.
You should also keep live discussions going on your page to attract new visitors as the posts of your followers about your company and services show up on the newsfeed of their friends and subscribers. That’s viral advertising at its best.
Update Your Images for SEO and Social Use
Ordinary pictures may not work when it comes to SEO. To successfully optimize your images for SEO, you need to consider the following factors: image quality and resolution, its accessibility, context, uniqueness, and adaptability. Image optimization is one of the important aspects of promotion.
What Is Best Social Media for SEO?
There are multiple social media channels that can be used to skyrocket your SEO. Apps and sites discussed below lend themselves to SEO social media marketing due to their popularity and high ranks in search engines. Most users seeking information about a brand or company go directly to their social media profiles, not the official website. This is largely because social networks offer a personal touch and often, a faster response time. Social media also helps businesses to expand their outreach and connect with more potential buyers. Your target audience uses various ways to get insights into a company they just discovered.
Medium
If not enough people are visiting your site, writing blogs on Medium might be a good idea. This platform contributes to you building a larger following that you may not have been able to reach otherwise. Medium facilitates the publishing of original and repurposed content, personal stories, and republished pieces. Medium articles often rank high in search results for the most competitive keywords.
Search engines consider the amount of likes and reposts that Facebook users add to your company page. They are valued more than the likes collected by individual posts. The number of likes is directly related to the number of links to the site. Each user who likes the company's page leaves a link on their own page. When it comes to reposts, they are even more effective than likes. Of course, for website promotion, it is most useful when users both leave a like and share the post.
LinkedIn is the most effective way of generating leads. Because the primary objective of SEO and social media is bringing in leads, the website is highly valuable for businesses. A large percentage of B2B marketing specialists include LinkedIn in their content marketing arsenal. If you use LinkedIn, your brand is more likely to be discovered by users in search results. Optimize your profile in accordance with SEO best practices such as using popular search terms aka “keywords” in your texts, adding call-to-action phrases, etc.
The most effective social network in terms of SEO. Search engines react very quickly when a link appears in a tweet. When indexing Twitter, search engines give the best positions to those tweets that have:
- A significant number of retweets
- An authoritative author with a large number of followers.
People will find your tweets quickly if you use relevant hashtags. This promotes brand recognition and drives website traffic. If you haven't been using Twitter to assist in your social media marketing, you could be missing out on a golden opportunity. You should tweet links to your site often without coming across as a scammer. The likes, retweets, and comments will help Google to rank your site highly.
YouTube
YouTube’s search engine receives the second-most amount of traffic after Google. However, there usually isn’t much commercial intent behind these searches. Still, you can use the video-sharing site to support your SEO.
If your business niche makes it possible to create video content with subsequent posting on YouTube, you definitely need to use it. It’s important that you put a link to your site in the description box. However, you should make sure that the content is really interesting since the number of link clicks depends on the number of views.
Quora
People don’t always realize just how much Quora can help their SEO. People use this site to ask questions about things they’re interested in. Their queries contain keywords that your target audience is using on Google. You can respond to their questions with helpful information and a relevant link to your blog or website. You can also create your own content on Quora. Exchanges on this also appear in search engines.
Pinterest is a worldwide catalog of ideas. It is similar to Instagram in that the main focus is on visual content. Users on Pinterest post pictures or videos - so-called Pins. For each Pin, you can add a description and a link to your site. Pinterest is an ideal platform for the promotion of E-commerce websites. The main condition for successful promotion is high-quality visual design. The more attractive the images look, the more likely it is that Pinterest users will click the link. Beautiful images also generate traffic from image searches in Google. Having a good photographer on staff and setting up an SEO-optimized profile can help you to attract long-lasting, free traffic to your site.
If you use Reddit properly, you can drive large amounts of traffic to your website. However, you need to take the time to understand the type of content that does well on this platform. You’ll have to find your niche and create a linked post for a related subreddit or discussion group. You should also prepare your website for your new visitors. Here are some tips to help you:
- The landing page should be very high quality. The site itself should make a good impression and have a modern design. It shouldn't be oversaturated with ads.
- Your site should be mobile-responsive. A large proportion of Reddit visitors come from smartphones and tablets.
- Your site should have a call-to-action for subscribing to your email newsletter. It would be silly if you attract thousands of interested visitors to your site and don’t provide them with the opportunity to subscribe to your newsletter. Reddit can very effectively accelerate the growth of your subscriber base.
Why Is Social Media Important for SEO?
Today, many people actively use social media profiles for various purposes. Someone reads the news, someone communicates with friends, someone builds a business. Most of the pages in social networks are adapted for use on mobile devices, from where it is much more comfortable to use various resources, which is a very big advantage of using social networks over other services.
By placing links to your sites on profiles in social networks, it is much easier to get fast distribution and gain the trust of the target audience. It also helps to expand the circle of potential buyers and increase the level of trust.
How to Use SEO for Social Media: 5 Ways to Optimize Your Profile
- Add more details. Many customers today prefer to trust profiles that are filled with information, but remember to keep things fun and don’t get too formal.
- Use keywords in your profile. Want your profile to rank faster? Use more keywords in your profile description and posts.
- Add links to your site. Another way to attract attention to your site is to place links to it from your social media posts.
- Spread the word. Share your site content online and encourage others to do the same.
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Create catchy content. Make your content worthy of linking to: add relevant information, use eye-catching headings, fill posts with useful information.
Unsure How to Step Up Your Social Media SEO Game? Come to DLD!
It should now be clear how social media boosts SEO. Even though Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter may not directly impact your rankings, they play an important role in your SEO strategy. This is because they get more eyes on your brand and your content and this further drives traffic to your site. Social media pages also rank highly on the usual search results pages so optimizing your pages will contribute to your larger SEO strategy.
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