Marketers and business leaders have long debated whether social media directly impacts SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Some say social signals such as liking, retweeting, or gaining followers don’t influence SEO rankings whereas others say social media can impact factors that affect rankings. Social media today is capable of more than just driving traffic to your site. Though sharing links to your social media business pages is a promising factor for driving more traffic to your page, social media can help with content creation too.
Content creation is one of the most valuable ways to increase your business’s SEO rankings. When you create customer-centric content, you offer your audience valuable information. You can do it in various forms such as ebooks, blogs, videos, infographics, articles, etc. Content marketing includes sharing valuable knowledge with your target audience that they are looking for.
Once leads find your content on the internet, they’ll spend time reading it. The more time they spent on your page; the better your chances of ranking high. Because more time spent on your content page sends a signal to Google that your page is valuable. Then Google will rank your page higher to help more leads find your valuable information.
Going the organic way is good but you can use social media instead to help more audiences discover your content fast. Social media just gives you the required boost to share valuable content with your followers. You know your followers and audience very well, so your relevant content will help them get engaged with your content which will eventually lead to business growth.
Social media also creates the opportunity for you to expand your content’s reach further. Your brand’s followers can share your content often with others and thus create the opportunity for new leads to spot on your content. This will eventually create more exposure for your brand and drives more leads to your webpage.
An increase in traffic on your website means that more people are reading your content, which will improve your SEO rankings. Therefore, social media is the key to helping you increase both.
Magical Use Of Social Media To Gain Backlinks
Social signals do matter because content that gets shared a lot get seen a lot. Content that is seen by influential social media creators often leads to backlinks. And thus content with more backlinks ranks higher on Google.
It’s the backlinks, not the social signals that help improve the SEO ranking for your business behind the scene. So, developing the right following, which includes creators, has a significant impact on the number of backlinks you can expect to develop through social media.
What’s The Best Way To Get High-Quality Backlinks?
This question may give you nightmares but isn’t so difficult to achieve. Start with building link-worthy content that informs your target audience. To do so, you can include blog posts, guides, and topic clusters on your bucket list. They attract links naturally. Links from social media sites such as Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. though don’t have direct influence on SEO but can indirectly benefit it.
The more exposure and resharing your content get, the better its chances for external links creation. Promoting content through email marketing and push notifications are yet another fruitful ways to generate backlinks for your content. To beat your competitors’ backlinks; get your research done using an extremely beneficial tool like Ubersuggest.
Integrating Social Media with SEO – How?
As with any social media strategy or SEO, content plays a vital role in deciding how successful your overall strategy is going to be.
When rightfully done content marketing, best SEO practices and thoughtful social media strategies come together to complement each other; they create a sweet spot for any business. Creating great content is the only possible way to reach this sweet spot that informs your audience.
Topic Clusters
Topic clusters are a fruitful way to structure your informational content and include SEO in your content mix. In topic clusters, the main topic is known as the pillar content. And the sub-topics are the cluster content. While structuring your content, make sure to use hyperlinks between your cluster content and pillar content.
Tailor Your Content
Think about what stage of the journey your customers are at so you can nurture them in the funner. Informational content is most imperative at the top when generating brand awareness and interest. People aren’t ready to make a buying decision yet. The closer your audience is to make a buying decision, the more important transactional content becomes. This is where you make the conversion process as smooth as possible for customers.
A common mistake that everyone makes here is to focus solely on transactional content. If your social media channels are all asks and promotions, you won’t build the following that you want. It’s harder to gain a good SEO ranking if you’ve just framed transactional content.
Therefore make your first content informational and then go for transactional content. This will make the content more appealing to both social media and Google.
How to Improve Your Social SEO for Various Social Media Platforms?
As discussed, social media sharing doesn’t directly impact SEO. However, when you share your content on various social media platforms, it can influence SEO in these ways:
- Increase visibility
- Expand content reach
- Drive organic traffic
- Improve local SEO practices
- Increase backlinks
- And enhance brand recognition
So, take time to craft your social media profile with content that’s engaging and reflects your business. Include as many details as possible so that you can give a clear picture of what your business does. Use more long-tail keywords that are relevant to your business. Generate backlinks to your website content to drive traffic.
Pay more attention to influencers and try to use them more often. You don’t have to aim that high for your influencer marketing strategy for businesses, but if you know of influencers in your sector that your audience listens to then it may be worth considering using them in your social media strategy.
Things can change overnight in the world of SEO, so you need to keep on top of trends and developments to keep up. FCS has the professional expertise to teach you the fundamentals and let you dive into the diverse social media platforms. Call us today to master your social SEO practices for major social media platforms to drive traffic and leads flawlessly.