Leveraging Social Media for SEO Success: Strategies for Increased Visibility

Intro

Love it or hate it, social media is one of the most powerful tools in the world, especially for brands, to build a community, start a conversation, tell a story, get opinions from others, and provide value to your audience.

Another thing it’s particularly useful for? Search engine optimization (SEO).

In the world of marketing, all your mentions are linked together in the eyes of the customer. So, if you adhere to all the best practices of creating a social profile and engaging on these platforms, your efforts are bound to reflect on your website’s ranking.

Simply put, your social media SEO can greatly impact your website’s visibility and ranking. So, let’s go ahead and explore how to structure your social media such that you get effective results.

The relationship between these two (social media and SEO) can be defined as a two-part pragmatism.

For one, the more valuable content you upload on your social sites and the more traffic you bring to those pages, the more people will remember you.

So, if more and more people search for you via a search engine, you get tagged as a credible website, improving your website visibility. Plus, if search engines think you’re credible, they also index newer content faster.

For the second part, if you add your website links to your social media pages, you receive backlinks from (i) the social media site itself and (ii) from other authors who’ve shared your social media content on their blogs.

And if people click on those links, you indirectly drive traffic to your website.

Having said that, Google treats social media and websites as two completely different channels. And it doesn’t directly correlate how well you do on a social page to your website’s SEO score.

However, it still considers your website’s traffic and credibility as a ranking factor. Bing, on the other hand, ranks pages with more social shares.

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1. Optimize your profiles

First and foremost, you’ll need to optimize all your social profiles. For example, on LinkedIn, you’ll need to completely populate your about us section, bio, home page, website link, jobs, events, etc.

The same goes for other social channels, too. Even the fun ones like TikTok — so don’t forget to add a link to your TikTok bio.

Additionally, make sure you’re adding the relevant keywords (aka keywords people are likely to search for) in your bio and using your background space mindfully.

For example, if you consider uSERP’s company page, they not only tell you their exact service offering in their bio but also reinstate the point (plus, add social proof) in their background image too.

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Another way to optimize your profile is to post content with targeted keywords and your website links. For example, if you’ve recently conducted a study, share it on your social media pages with links to your study.

The same goes for any kind of content — if you’ve written more about it on your website, don’t forget to link to it. For example, consider the posts Animalz uploads:

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2. Create content accessibility and shareability

Another tip you can use to your advantage is to make your content accessible and shareable. Of course, this isn't only limited to social media content, but, rather, any kind of content you produce.

So, to make your content accessible, you can:

Add alt text to images
Use inclusive language
Format it correctly
Use fewer jargon and acronyms
Add captions to videos
Share it in different formats

If your eyes just rolled to the back of your head, don’t worry. There are plenty of tools out there to help do the heavy lifting. For instance, consider this list of best text-to-speech software to transcribe audio files to enable search engine crawlers to index the content, improving your site's visibility.

And to make it shareable, optimize your profile (we discussed how to do this in the previous section), add the necessary keywords, hashtags, and sharing buttons, and maintain the brand messaging on every platform (i.e., your social content can’t be saying one thing, and your website another).

For example, if you consider Termly, a free privacy policy generator, one quick look at their social profiles will point out exactly what they do.

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This branding matches its website to a t. The result? Lower bounce rates and higher trust signals to Google.

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3. Maintain consistency in posting

Aside from creating consistent brand messaging, another way you must develop consistency is with frequency in publishing.

Almost every social media user agrees the more consistent you are in publishing, the higher you’ll rank on other people’s feeds. And to improve the SEO score of your website, you must first get noticed.

Another thing to consider is posting times. Your posts will have better engagement if you post when your audience is on the platform. The ideal posting times differ based on the platform and location — so feel free to research the best posting times for your brand.

4. Focus on valuable and high-quality content creation

The importance of value-driven marketing is as old as marketing itself. Only if you create good content are people bound to share it with others.

However, to make truly exceptional content, understand which platforms your target audience hangs out at, what kind of content they consume on those platforms, and how you can create platform-native, high-quality content.

For example, consider Him & Hers’ strategy. To promote their best-selling products like minoxidil for women, they create platform-native high-quality content.

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What do we mean by that? Each social media platform has a different algorithm. So pay attention to the platform-native content that performs best on each channel.

For example, some platforms, like Instagram, help Reels rank higher than a simple image, while others, like LinkedIn, promote PDFs more than text posts. LinkedIn’s recent algorithm changes also suggest that content (either original content or the posts you comment on) that adds value to the lives of the reader will get ranked higher.

So Hims & Hers uses this information to its advantage. They leverage Instagram Reels to create videos with real people discussing hair loss problems and the best solutions that meet their needs. Not only does this add a face to their brand, but it also provides valuable insights and guidance via the most popular social media format for that platform.

And by actively responding to comments, messages, and inquiries, they foster a sense of trust and credibility. This high level of engagement not only helps build relationships with their followers but also indicates to search engines that Hims & Hers is a reputable and valuable source of information.

The result? A positive impact on their SEO rankings.

5. Target relevant keywords and hashtags

Strategic use of keywords, hashtags, and tags on social media helps you get noticed faster because if a person is looking for something based on a keyword, yours is one of the first posts that'll rank.

And since more and more people are buying because of social media these days, it makes sense to create these posts and get noticed faster in front of prospects.

Consider brands like Custom Frame Store as an example — they use keywords like "ready-made wholesale picture frames" and "customized art picture frames,” as well as hashtags to reach a wider audience.

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So, never underestimate the number one rule of a good SEO strategy: targeting the right keywords that your audience is searching for.

6. Build genuine relationships

You ideally want everyone who comes across your social media profile/posts to become a follower or a fan because of the empathic tone you use, the platform native content you create, and the high-quality posts you develop.

And if you get these people, we highly recommend building authentic relationships with them by replying to their comments, creating posts they’d like, and providing value to them.

If you do all of this, you’re bound to get more engagement and organic traffic not only on your social media channels but also on your website. Social signals work wonders.

7. Repurpose content

Lastly, another recommendation would be to look into content repurposing to keep up with your content cadence.

It might be difficult to create ten different posts for each social media platform, plus your podcast, website, and paid ads. But if you create one or two pillar pieces, you can repurpose the same content.

Ideally, get a writer on board to help you with content repurposing (services like Content Remix are particularly popular). But if that goes out of your budget, you can use content rewriter tools like Simplified’s AI blog writer to help you with the same service and efficiently generate new social media posts.

Several experts even suggest creating a piece of content (like ‌blog posts) such that you can later share them on social channels.

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Now that we’re done with the strategy part of social SEO, let’s focus on the execution part of social media for SEO by covering which social platforms to leverage for increased visibility.

First and foremost, your focus should be on LinkedIn as it's a platform, people go to learn more about the company, and due to the platform’s design, people get more leads from there and more opportunities to link and promote their content.

Other platforms on your list should be Medium (again, great for linking and content promotion), Facebook, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Instagram, and Pinterest.

Here’s an extensive guide by Hootsuite that’ll help you improve your search rankings through individual social media channels: SEO tips for every network.

Improve your SEO efforts with Ranktracker

Social media marketing and SEO go together to improve your website’s visibility and get your name out there in front of customers.

And now that you’ve covered the meatier bits about how to improve your social game, it’s now time to focus on what you can do vis-a-vis SEO.

Well, to get noticed, you can improve your SEO efforts by checking your website rank, finding high-volume keywords, understanding your backlink status, auditing your website for SEO errors, and checking out your visibility on the search engine results page (SERP).

So, what’s the one way to do all of that?

The answer’s right in front of you, and it’s Ranktracker! Our solution has all the tools you need to improve your search engine rankings, and it’s all neatly packaged into one software‌ package.

Moreover, you can get this software at a starting price of $19/month. But before you do that, start a free trial to get comfortable with the product before you commit.

Leveraging Social Media for SEO Success: Strategies for Increased Visibility