8 Steps For Social SEO Success
For years, businesses have invested in Search Engine Optimisation to expand their reach and become accessible to as many potential clients and customers as possible. However, with ever-evolving disruptions within the digital space and a ranking algorithm that is constantly changing, an adaptive SEO strategy is now vital for success.
Social SEO, centering around improving your search engine ranking through improving content and keywords within social media channels, has risen in popularity in the past few years – albeit with ambiguity from Google in terms of whether or not a social signal improves a business’s search engine ranking. Irrespective of whether the number of followers your business has on a social media channel directly affects its website’s SEO ranking, there are an immense number of benefits of a well-developed social SEO strategy.
Social SEO increases the visibility of your business through driving traffic to your website and ensuring your social media accounts further populate search engine results pages. With the number of social media users and searches growing exponentially in recent years, social really is the new SEO. We have outlined a step-by-step social SEO success strategy – read on to improve your ability to connect with and inspire action from your potential clients and customers.
1- Create Quality Content
Effective content is the very foundation of SEO success stories – the entire purpose of Google’s ranking algorithm is to direct people to sites that are of most use to them. Using SEO tricks can work to improve your ranking in the short term, but at the end of the day, it is in the best interest of you and your customers to create useful content that Google can direct them to.
Blog posts, podcasts, infographics and other shareable content mediums are among the most successful in driving website traffic and improving your SEO ranking. With these valuable pieces of content as the backbone to your social SEO strategy, you will have a library of content that people care about to post across your social channels. These posts have a twofold effect of driving traffic back to your website and increasing your social media following, which can also help boost the search result ranking of your social media pages.
2- Take Advantage Of All Relevant Platforms
With social media sites taking over search engine results pages as they grow in popularity, ensuring your business is active on relevant social media platforms is more important than ever. A strong profile on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or Pinterest can be shown in the list of results on search engine results page, providing another opportunity to connect with your customers and share your fantastic content.
Social media pages that appear within search results also elevate the credibility of your brand, improving the chance that customers will look at your various channels and engage with your content. This means that streamlining your social media platforms and picking relevant content is a critical step in your social media strategy to improve your social SEO.
3- Fill In The Blanks
There are so many opportunities to share your business’ story, vision and value through descriptions, headlines and information within your social media channels – don’t let this space go to waste!
Leverage your LinkedIn description to provide a succinct summary of your business, utilizing keywords that users may be searching in Google or within LinkedIn itself. Optimizing your accounts using all of the description space available puts your social media on the search engine results page and has the added bonus of making your account more personal by providing further information about who you are as a business and what you stand for.
4- Make Your Accounts Look Legitimate
If you already have accounts on the social media channels you need, duplicate accounts, outdated information or low-quality profile photos can be detrimental to your brand, deterring potential customers from engaging with your social media account and preventing you from reaping social SEO benefits.
Investing a little time into updating your social media profile and creating a legitimate look has a significant payoff. To optimize your social media presence, ensure you do not have any duplicate or unused accounts, update copy and photos to reflect your business and ensure your profiles include working links.
5- Use Keywords In Social Media Copy
After creating professional, up to date profiles across your social media channels, optimizing them for SEO is the next step. If you are already using keywords in your website copy, now is the time to include them in your social media platforms! If not, utilize Google AdWords or other keyword search platforms to gain an understanding of what your customers are looking for.
Armed with this knowledge, you can carefully craft copy to use in your suite of social media platforms so that individuals searching on them are more likely to land on your page and engage with your business.
6- Include Backlinks In Posts
Although Google has been relatively ambiguous as to whether social links are considered valid backlinks to your website, a study by Hootsuite found that a higher social following is associated with better search engine rankings.
Although correlation is not the same as causation, a higher social following does direct traffic to your website and there are plenty of examples of viral social media posts that have landed businesses in rank 1 on Google. The more people that like, share and link to your content on social media, the more visitors you have to your site and the better the ranking. This is precisely why a focus on social SEO can have massive payoffs for the visibility of your business.
7- Post Often
Successful social media accounts post regular updates for followers, producing a consistent stream of opportunities to share your well-crafted, SEO optimized content with your social media channels.
Ad hoc posts have been proven time and time again to be ineffective. Although it takes time to plan social media posts ahead of time, it is far greater use of your time than sporadic marketing activities. Social media calendars can be a great way to make this easier and ensure that you are always on schedule with posts.
8- Be Social
Your social media strategy is not a ‘set and forget’ solution to increase the visibility of your business. Social media is exactly that, social!
By making connections with other individuals in your industry or potential customers, you can grow both the reach and visibility of your content in addition to growing your social media following. This bolsters not only the number of people landing on your website but also the size of your following which will allow you to reap significant long-term benefits. Your social media strategy should include different activities that speak to your customers to improve their engagement and make them more likely to stick around.
With social media channels becoming more and more popular as a way for people to obtain information and engage with businesses, social media’s importance to SEO will continue to expand. The search engine ranking benefits of your social media accounts appearing as search results and the indirect link between strong engagement and the ranking of your website means that there is no doubt that social media has an important impact on your SEO success. As we share, like and connect with each other online more and more every day, there has never been a better time to include social SEO as part of your marketing strategy.
