Let’s face it, social media is an essential part of ensuring your company ranks with Google. Now is the time to assess your social media and SEO practices and make sure you have a streamlined unified approach. And as the web evolves, social media will continue to become more and more important. Soon, there may not be a definitive division between social and non-social interactions online. The fact is, social media is the key to digital marketing efforts.
What does this mean for your business? It means that you don’t have time to question whether you should be using social media as part of your marketing mix. The days of questioning the value of social media as a “marketing tool” are past, you need to embrace social media as a central element of your marketing today.
SEO is no longer just focused on keywords and inbound website links. Search engines are now looking at social signals from social media channels to validate credibility. We expect search engines to increase their reliance on social signals as the social web evolves. With these social signals playing a bigger role, it’s time to address how you can be more social with SEO in mind.
Tips to maximize your SEO with Social Media Marketing:
1. Publish Quality Content For SEO
Quality content is in our opinion, the most important part of your social media and SEO strategy. Now don’t get me wrong, quality content alone is not going to drive your sales, but it is a major key for any solid digital marketing strategy that is trying to leverage organic search as a part of the equation.
It’s important to note that quality over quantity is important. Google continues to push for quality and for good reason. Search engines do not want repeat content that is cut and pasted from another website, or “guest” posts that are published on multiple websites. Remember, your content cannot only be focused on SEO. Incorporating as many SEO keywords as possible will not keep your readers’ attention and it will hurt your rankings as Google is smart and they know when you are “stuffing” keywords into your content. You need to write for your audience and include keywords smoothly. It’s both an art and a science.
Think of it this way, the better content you produce the more excited people will be to connect with you and more likely they will be to do business with you. People are also more willing to share a really great blog post with others which will drive more people to your website. Finally, really great content is often linked to by other websites which gives you the in-bound links that are so valuable for SEO. Content really is king and will continue to be in the future.
2. Include Social Share Buttons For SEO
You want your content to be shared. Make it easy for people to share it by incorporating social share buttons on your blog and website. You want to make sure your share buttons are set to include your company name, URL and hashtags. This is part of what search engines are looking for with social signals. We personally like share buttons that have counters attached to show others how many people are interacting and sharing the blog post. People tend to share more often when they see others are sharing too.
3. Optimize Images For SEO
Optimizing your images on social media channels and on your blog is an important and powerful SEO approach that most people miss. Optimizing images for SEO means using keywords to fill in metadata, title and alternative title. You want to fill in all these fields every time you publish a photo on your website and/or blog. On social media channels, make sure when possible to share the photos with keywords, hashtags and URLs and/or information about the photo.
4. Social Media Strategy For SEO
It is not enough to simply share your content on your social media channels and hope it goes viral. The real work in social media marketing and SEO comes with your social media strategy. Having a sound strategy that includes building a community that is engaged and cares about your company and product is essential. Leveraging advertising both on Facebook, Google Ads and perhaps other channels such as Instagram is also an important part of the strategy. This is an ongoing process which needs to be adjusted and constantly managed. A set it and forget mentality will not work. Getting free advertising by posting your Facebook page will not work either. To be competitive in today’s marketplace you need to have a viable social media / digital marketing strategy in place.