5 Social Media Strategies to Boost Your SEO

Intro

If you want to improve your online rankings and your SEO, there are many strategies to do so. Part of this means optimizing your social media profiles. While branded social media accounts do not directly contribute to SEO ranking, links shared across platforms increase brand exposure, which will then influence SEO.

Why is Social Media Crucial for SEO?

As mentioned previously, links shared on your social media platforms will increase the exposure of your brand, which generates signals to search engines to indicate that your posts are useful and relevant, and thus your website should be ranked higher in SEO. Additionally, when your followers share your links further, it adds to that metric that you should be ranked higher.

Social Media Helps Create Link Opportunities

Twitter is possibly the best social media for SEO. On Twitter, you should strive to tweet about your newest or most relevant page or article 3-5 times a day. Then, you can find key influencers within your niche area and start up genuine conversations with them in the replies, or their DMs if their DMs are open. If you can get them to retweet one of your links, it will then reach a wider audience and drive more people to your site, which then means that Google will recognize it as being more relevant.

You can also do similar things on social media sites like Facebook and Instagram, but you will also need to pair photos with the posts to get attention. If you are good at videos, you can utilize TikTok and YouTube as well. Then your followers can start to use your social media as a search engine in and of itself, and you get more engagement.

You can also use social media to help generate backlinks for yourself, which is another way to increase your SEO ranking.

Social Media Establishes Authority

Having a presence for your brand on social media improves the authority of your brand and your site. To best establish your authority, do not just repeat every event and article you post. Engage with others in your niche and build a community. This will help bring about more authority.

The community does not only have to be made out of people doing something similar to you, you can also build a community with influencers and your audience. The combination of everyone involved will bring about the best network for you to flourish in.

Make sure you are listening to those within the community and provide the most valuable content possible. Also, make sure you are consistent. Doing all of these things means that your account is getting regular engagement which means your links are being clicked on, which means your site is being visited, which ranks you higher in SEO.

Social Media Increases Brand Awareness

The relationship between SEO and social media also comes down to brand awareness. Brand awareness is when people can recognize your brand amidst others. Having a large social media platform enables you to put a face on your brand and interact with your customers in positive ways. In short, social media increases your brand awareness in these ways:

• Enabling engagement
• Promoting content
• Social sharing

You can utilize any combination of media across the different social sites. Instagram does require photos and TikTok does require videos, but places like Facebook and Twitter let you use text, images, and videos in your posts. Let yourself be visual and operate within the maximum bounds of your brand. Also remember to post consistently and at optimal times for each of the social sites.

Given that we live in a global economy, it is best to tailor your posts for when the majority of your customers are online. Additionally, spread posts out throughout the day to get people who log on at different times.

These are the best tips for increasing your brand awareness, which improves your overall SEO.

Social Media Builds Partnerships

Building partnerships is one of the best things you can do with social media. Partnerships go both ways, so make sure you are giving in order to get. Social media makes it easy to find people and interact with them, which cuts back on the time you would otherwise spend researching people and tracking them down to cultivate that partnership. Additionally, social media tends to be lower pressure than finding a website and emailing.

As you build these partnerships, you set yourself up for backlinks, which naturally play into increasing your SEO. Additionally, your customers and their customers may end up merging after you’ve created a partnership, which drives more traffic to your site and theirs both. All of this put together puts more customer trust in you, which translates to search engines marking you as reliable, relevant, and useful.

Social Media Boosts Content Engagement and Lifespan

Unfortunately, in today’s digital age, there is always the push to remain relevant constantly. However, by putting your stuff out there on social media and getting the shares, retweets, reposts, etc, you are enabling more engagement with your content which increases the lifespan of its relevance. This will inevitably go way farther than just posting an article or blog on your website.

Post on Twitter and get likes, replies, retweets, and quote retweets. This means your content is circulating around broader circles than just your immediate followers. This may increase your follower count, and will also increase the likelihood of someone clicking on one of those links. Put your content on Instagram and get comments and other engagement and eventually, the algorithm will put your posts in similar circles. The more engagement you have, the longer the lifespan of your content.

Social Media Strategies to Boost Your SEO

Ultimately, there are a lot of ways that you can boost your SEO with social media. Below, we will go into the 5 ways to maximize SEO and social media and how to incorporate social media into SEO strategy.

Optimize All Your Social Media Profiles

The purpose of optimizing your social media profiles is to boost their visibility in search engines, both externally with Google, Bing, etc. and internally within social media websites and apps. Fill out your profiles with keywords related to your niche. Do this for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and any other socials you have a presence on.

This, combined with posting regularly at optimal times will ensure that you have a robust social media presence and increase the likelihood that you show up when people search for stuff related to your niche. Also, you will want to have a presence on the popular social media sites to protect your reputation - so no one else can go out and pretend to be you.

Link All Your Social Media Accounts To Your Website

In all of your social media profiles, make sure to include a link that goes back to your website. Naturally, when you share about new posts on your website in your tweets, posts, or even videos, you should include links that go back to your site as well. You want your followers to go back to your website.

Your website should also include links to your socials. Most websites make this very easy to set up. This helps engagement with your followers, improves your authority, and boosts your SEO ranking. Google in specific looks for these sorts of things and while the algorithm isn’t 100% clear, it does have proven results.

Produce High quality and targeted content

This should be a no-brainer. Your followers and customers are expecting the best from you and they will only continue to be your followers and customers if you keep providing engaging, quality, relevant, and targeted content. As we said before, you don’t just want to re-post your latest website updates, you’ll want to engage with the community and network.

Employ A Specific Profile Strategy Per Social Media Account

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube all cater to different audiences. And those are just the top socials because there are others out there as well. Facebook benefits from longer posts where Twitter limits you to 280 characters per tweet - though you can thread. You absolutely need to have an image to post on Instagram, and both TikTok and YouTube are video based.

This does have the benefit of allowing you to reach broader audiences because some people are not on every social media site or do not think to follow you on every one of them that they are on. You can also tailor content per each site.

There are social media managers that you can pay for to manage your content for you. This means you only need to queue content up and let the program run its course. This can be effective if you have the extra money to pay for the manager in exchange for saving you some time remembering what time you need to post on which account.

Good social media managers include:

• Hootsuite
• Sprout Social
• Zoho
• MeetEdgar
• Loomly
• Sendible
• Buffer
• SocialPilot

Whether you choose to use a social media manager or not, you should document out what strategy you wish to employ per social media app so you don’t get things mixed up.

Monitor And Improve Your Analytics

There are many sites and programs out there to help you monitor your social media analytics. They can help you track impressions, engagements, and conversions. Google Analytics can provide you with a lot of information. You can also utilize social media managers like we were talking about above. Rank Tracker is another good program for analytics.

You can use the information these programs give you to adjust your social media strategy to optimize your engagements and impressions.

Conclusion

Social Media does in fact play a role in SEO, just not the most obvious one. Now you know about all the ways how social media and SEO work together for a successful brand campaign. So get out there and optimize your social media for SEO!