Article

Sean Davis
Sean Davis 27 May 2022

SEO and Social Media: How to Make Them Work Together

Business owners new to digital marketing often think that social media and SEO are distinct entities and operate with different goals. However, this is a misconception that needs to be broken.

It is crucial to understand that both social media and SEO work together to bring more visitors to your site and enhance your visibility. This also means you need to ensure that your digital marketing strategy does its best to have both social media and SEO working together.

In this blog, we’ll learn how to make social media and SEO work together, understand why is social media important for SEO, and vice versa.

What is SEO?   

Before we dive deep into discussing social media and SEO integration, let’s briefly understand what SEO is. 

You must already know that search engines help customers find your business. Today, one of the main objectives of businesses is to get their websites to rank higher in search engine results. SEO, short for Search Engine Optimization, refers to the techniques used in the pursuit of this objective. 

SEO is the process in which you improve your website to increase its visibility when individuals search for services or products related to your business on search engines such as Bing, Google, etc. 

Businesses follow the process of SEO to improve the quantity and quality of web traffic to a web page or a website from search engines.

Note: 

Google considers hundreds of factors to determine the order in which the results should be ranked for a user’s search query. People outside Google do not precisely know how these factors work. However, businesses looking to increase their search engine rankings can refer to some guidelines identified by SEO experts. For instance, Google heavily weighs the factors mentioned below:

  • How users interact with a page, including time on page, bounce rates, and other metrics
  • The quality and amount of content on a website
  • The website’s trustworthiness in providing unbiased, accurate information about a topic
  • The website’s level of authority in answering the questions of searchers
  • The level of expertise of the content creators of the website

Tip:

As businesses look for ways to improve their ranking in search engine results, a crucial area to concentrate on is creating keyword-rich, high-quality content. The content should be as per the needs of their target audience and solve the queries they might have. 

What is Social Media Marketing? 

It is also important to understand social media marketing before discussing social media and SEO integration.

As per the latest social media statistics, 4.20 billion people use social media. There are a number of social media platforms out there, such as Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and Snapchat. These platforms provide ample marketing opportunities for any business, irrespective of their industry, size, and target audience. 

For those who are new to the term, social media marketing is the process of creating content tailored for every social media platform to drive engagement and promote your business. 

This includes sharing your latest blog, posting videos, sharing news about your business, promoting exclusive offers, replying to comments, and answering questions - all with the aim of engaging existing as well as potential customers.  

Do Social Media Marketing and SEO Share a Direct Link?

Microsoft Bing has confirmed that it considers the number of social media shares a page gets to determine the ranking of that page in search results. Google, on the other hand, states that social media is not considered as a direct ranking factor. Still, it is important to note that there are a lot of ways in which the social media presence of a business can positively impact its search engine results (discussed in the next section).

How to Make Social Media Marketing and SEO Work Together

SEO and social media marketing both provide powerful ways to make your business visible to your target customers. Both of these strategies also help drive engagement, increase brand awareness, and eventually increase sales.

As mentioned before, thinking of social media marketing and SEO as two entirely different strategies is a mistake many businesses make. Although both of these involve different techniques, the two function jointly in many ways. Let’s take a closer look at how: 

1. Social Media Helps Promote your Content and Drives Traffic to your Website

When you publish content on your website, ensure you use social media to share the post with links back to your website. These links can influence crucial SEO metrics such as bounce rate and time on a page. If the users find your content appealing, they will definitely click through to your website and spend time reading your posts.

Tip: Do ensure you create and publish high-value content as per the interests and needs of your target audience.  

2. Social Media Provides Opportunities to Gain Backlinks 

High-quality backlinks play an important role in helping your website jump to the top of the search engine results. Posting your content on social media can unlock opportunities to acquire high-quality backlinks to your site over time. 

For instance, every time you share content on social media that your audience finds insightful, they might also share it with their networks. If they do this, it increases the visibility and reach of your content. As a result of this entire process, the chances that other websites link back to your website also increase. 

3. Social Media Profiles Appear in Search Engine Results   

When a person searches for your business online, your social media profiles are amongst the top links that show up in the search results, apart from your website. 

Take steps to make your business come across as more authoritative when a person searches for your business online. Here’s what you can do:

  • Ensure that your social media profiles are complete and have up-to-date information.
  • It should also have positive reviews from customers. 

When you execute the above steps, you get to increase brand awareness and drive more traffic to your site.  

4. Social Media can Result in More Branded Searches

As social media users see your posts on social media platforms over time, they gradually learn about your offerings, which, in turn, increases the likelihood of them conducting online searches that include the name of your brand. This results in more traffic to your website and an increase in your ranking in search engine results.

5. Social Media Helps Provide Ideas for Creating High-Value Content

Social media is an incredible way to understand your target customers. This is because when you stay active on social media, you get to interact with your target customers, respond to their comments, answer their questions, and monitor feedback. This enables you to better understand their needs, interests, pain points, and more, which helps fine-tune the profile of your target customers. 

As a result of always remaining active on social media and interacting with your target audience, you are even able to develop content especially tailored for them. You also note which posts get the most engagement on social media and get ideas for content creation for your website.

It is simple - if your target audience expresses a keen interest in your topic on social media, they are more likely to click on the link related to the topic in the search engine results as well. As a result, it improves different SEO metrics, such as web traffic and time on site. 

6. Social Media Helps you Conduct Keyword Research 

Social media is a great place to find new keyword ideas. For instance, to find fresh ideas for long-tail Q&A keywords, you can consider publishing ‘ask the expert’ posts on your social media profiles. It not only boosts engagement but also helps you find what your target audience cares about. 

Another way to find new keyword opportunities is to follow social listening trends. Doing so tells you what individuals want to read and follow now.

7. Posting on Social Media Gets Content Indexed Faster

Use your social media platforms to get your pages indexed quickly by Google. For instance, when you publish new or refreshed content on your website, share it on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn on an immediate basis. This will get clicks to it and signal Google that there is a page that needs to be crawled and re-indexed. 

All in all, after going through these pointers, it becomes clear why social media is important for SEO.

Note: Your SEO efforts can also work in enhancing your social media strategy. Here’s how:

When you do keyword research, you get to know which types of topics appeal to your audience. This information can help you build an effective social media strategy. Also, as you identify the phrases people use to search for a specific service or product, you can integrate them in your social media posts accordingly. As a result, you will be able to increase engagement and conversions. 

Tip: Ensure you don’t do “keyword stuffing” in your social media posts. Always concentrate on offering value to your audience. 

Wrapping it Up   

The relationship between social media and SEO can prove helpful to businesses trying to gain online visibility and aiming for growth. Bottom line, one cannot deny the benefits of social media and SEO integration. It is important to make these two work cohesively to give your website the much-needed push to rank higher.

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