Building the Bridge: SEO and Social Media Strategies
What do SEO and social media have in common? More than you think!
Using social media to drive traffic to your website is an easy answer and common tool among basic marketing practices. This can be done by simply adding your website URL to every social media post you make. But a whole trove of benefits awaits when you align your business’s SEO and social media strategies. Read along in this month’s blog to unlock the potential of huge success when you allow SEO and social media strategies to work together:
Social Media Strategies
As a business, social media is one of the first steps in digital marketing. Social media strategies save time and deliver insightful results when developed and analyzed. Social media, when properly utilized by a business, will build brand awareness, allow you to share valuable and entertaining content with users, develop trust among online communities, share your expertise with the public, and ultimately drive targeted traffic to your website (SEO, is that you?). While there are an infinite number of strategies to employ for any given business, finding the right social media strategies for your brand is top priority. This involves choosing the right platform, from Twitter to Facebook to TikTok; adapting marketing messages between platforms, figuring out which topics users engage with most, creating compelling content, sharing innovative ideas, and so much more.
SEO Fundamentals
SEO (search engine optimization) is essentially the process of combing through the backend of a website and through all content to have it rank higher in search engine results. Every business’s goal is to have their website be the first result in a Google search, but that does not happen by chance. Professionals, like our SEO team, do the nitty gritty work for our clients in Colorado Springs and beyond. Common tasks for SEO experts include optimizing content on webpages with high ranking keywords, publishing new content relevant to current searches, and organization on the website’s backend to clearly communicate with search engines. While these few tasks barely begin to scratch the surface of what our SEO team does on a daily basis, these areas can be translated to your social media.
What is Social SEO?
Now that we have covered a bit about the purpose of social media strategies and a basic overview of SEO, let’s put the details together – this is what we call Social SEO. This is the act of translating your SEO analysis and data over your social media strategies. As with many marketing tasks, combining data and efforts is a common practice because it is crucial to keep strategies and messages seamlessly integrated to work towards one goal – the business’s success.
What does Social SEO look like?
Let’s look at an example from the basics: Take the highest ranking keywords and keyphrases in your keyword list each month and use this same content in your social media posts. Within your monthly keyword analysis, try to spot and filter out the questions that users are asking in search engines that relate to your business. Then, craft your own answers to those questions. Use these answers as you develop more content for your social media strategy. By using your SEO data to create social media content, your followers and others will realize that your posts are informational and useful. When social media users find posts to be entertaining and/or helpful, chances are much higher that they will click the link to your website in your post. This is how your SEO and social media strategies can be aligned.
Overall, this Social SEO strategy shows proof that you, as a business, are hearing the inquiries and questions consumers have about your industry, and that YOU are the one being part of the conversation. This strategy will build brand awareness of your company and position you to be an industry expert because people love engaging with brands who listen, care, and help. Throughout the course of this strategy, you can build a following that trusts you and will likely be encouraged to do business with you over other brands.
Social Media platforms continue to grow as a major search engine for users. Establishing a close relationship between your Social strategy and SEO strategy will give your business a competitive edge. The basic practice of Social SEO is not something you can try with one or two posts. This is a strategy that requires much data from social media and search engine optimization efforts, deliberate content creation, and overall, patience. Social media is a slow burner through and through. It is not possible to grow an entire following overnight in an authentic way or achieve high brand awareness with a single post. Our biggest piece of advice for any brand who is managing social media profiles is to be consistent. These two areas of digital marketing will work for and with each other when you launch a Social SEO strategy for your brand.