Social media isn’t necessarily a ranking factor. That means that then the search engines decide the search rankings, they don’t take social signals into account. But, these platforms help support an SEO strategy and improve its results.
Usually, social media factors into a brand’s content marketing strategy, as a way to empower brands to easily distribute their content to established and new audiences alike. Through this type of strategy, you can get a lot more leads, traffic, and even conversions, which in the end can help you with your SEO efforts.
Here are a few ways you can use social media platforms to improve your SEO results.
You might also be interested in WHAT ARE THE TOP TECHNIQUES FOR SEO?
Improving SEO using Social Media
1. Creating a Sharing Strategy
If you want to leverage social media for SEO, start by creating a sharing strategy to distribute some of your most valuable content to your audiences.
Posting loads of low-quality content won’t get your followers engaged, no matter how good your strategy is on paper. So, it’s really important to create good, fresh content for your target audience.
When you share your content you’re not just potentially increasing traffic – you’re also adding fuel to your link building efforts. Link building is a big ranking factor, as internal links help crawlers navigate your site, while backlinks (external links) speak to your site’s quality and relevancy. Social media link sharing is just one of many things you can do to build backlinks.
2. Grow Your Target
Social media shares are only the tip of the iceberg. To go further into your SEO efforts, you should also focus on growing your following on all your social media pages.
When you have more followers, you are increasing your opportunities to get your content in front of more people, and redirect them from your pages to your site, and increase traffic.
It’s important to grow your following organically. There are many apps or services out there that promise hundreds of new followers overnight for just a few hundred dollars, but these followers don’t act the same as earned ones. Specifically, you can end up with that type of page that has thousands of followers, but their posts only get a handful of likes or shares. Search engines notice these discrepancies and this type of practice hurts your SEO efforts.
To build your following, you need time to present your brand to your audience and give them a reason to follow and read your content. Social media marketing can help you speed things along, but your content strategy is what truly helps you gain more followers.
3. Talk to Your Audience
A huge benefit of social media sites is that brands can engage their audiences, and get closer to them.
For instance, when you share content on social media, you should also keep an eye on the comments. Some of your followers may share their thoughts, and it would be very appreciated if you answered them and kept the discussion going. For one thing, it’s a sign that your page is active, which can help with your SEO efforts. But it also helps new audiences who don’t know you yet to know your brand.
Think of potential branded searches that would bring up links to all your social media profiles. If a new user looks through your accounts and sees you are actively engaged with your followers, this starts building trust with the consumer.
Talking with your customers also shows them you’re not just sharing content to get a lead or a conversion. You’re actively growing a community! In response, they feel more connected to your business, and their behaviour changes accordingly.
4. Pay Attention to What They Want
When it comes to SEO and social media, audience behaviour is everything. On your site, you can notice how your audience behaves from your Google Analytics stats:
- What pages they visit most often
- How much time they spend on the pages
- What actions/activities they perform on your site, etc.
And much of these stats are available on social media as well, except here you can get a quick view of how well your efforts are doing. As you post your content on social media, ask yourself:
- Are the audiences engaging?
- Did they engage better with another type of post?
- Did they click on your link?
- Did they comment, share?
- What did they say?
Even seeing 0 results tells you everything you need to know about your efforts – it’s back to the drawing board. Social media can speak volumes about user behaviour and help brands improve their strategies to cater to customer needs directly. But to do that, you need to pay attention. And those lessons can be applied to your SEO strategy as well.
5. Improve Your Brand Recognition
Brand awareness or brand recognition refers to the extent to which a user can recognise your brand by name, logo, or any other elements they can associate with you. It’s a huge deal in SEO because when a user types something in a search query and recognizes your name through the results, they are more likely to click on your link even if it’s not the top result, simply because they know who you are.
This helps bring more search traffic in from user search and supports your other SEO efforts, such as content marketing. If the content they find is linked to their query, they are likely to return, which improves your ranking even more.
Work on Your SEO with Us
Efforts in digital marketing often revolve around improving a site’s search engine optimisation efforts. If yours needs some tweaks, Australian Internet Advertising is happy to assist all Sydney business owners to achieve real growth through their SEO efforts.
Get in touch with our SEO team today to get started on your strategy.
