Social Media SEO: Essential Tips Every Marketer Must Follow

Social media has a vast reach, which is why it is now known as contemporary marketing. It is proven to be very beneficial in the marketing context for businesses. In addition, it has significantly helped in creating brand recognition, market presence, and easy access to a target audience with content marketing or advertising, and much more.

While the aforementioned is known to be accurate, the main factor to consider as a digital marketer is whether it has any benefits for your website’s SEO. So, let’s delve deeper into the relationship between SEO and social media — Is there any at all? To your surprise, yes! There is a massive correlation, which is why only 49% of small businesses invest in direct SEO strategies, while the rest start from social media marketing.

Social media marketing is a valuable tool for communicating your message with customers and meeting your marketing and ranking goals. Unfortunately, many people believe there is no evidence that social media marketing works for SEO. However, you will see so many social media pages on the SERPs when you enter a relevant query if the social media channel of business performs exceptionally well. 

Given that we still aren’t sure, a webmaster trend analyst from Google also emphasized the link between social media and ranking on the SERPs back in 2017. With time more research has taken place on the same matter, and now many businesses are actively investing in social media marketing to receive ultimate ranking benefits with indirect SEO. 

Let’s dive deeper and discuss a few more things you need to know before getting started!  

The Power Of Social Media SEO

Back when Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and such platforms were introduced, no one could have guessed the power of social media. These platforms were merely experimental and considered a space for the young to share and communicate, who knew what they would turn into and how the industry would leverage the power of social media. Yet, today, these platforms work as a gigantic source of data and insights for the entire business world.  

From today’s standpoint, the power social media holds makes it one of the digital marketing giants of the marketing industry.

Let us focus on some stats.

1. As of the second quarter of 2021, Facebook has roughly about 2.89 billion users who were active monthly. It ranked seventh in internet usage globally and is only predicted to go upwards and onwards.
2. One of the four billion user properties owned by Facebook is Instagram. It, too, is now at 1 billion-plus monthly active users.
3. LinkedIn has 740 million users in 200+ countries.
4. Today, more than 91.9% of companies are investing in social media marketing for various purposes. 

With the majority of the workforce and target audience worldwide found on these online platforms, the use of social media should naturally leverage your SEO efforts. 

Google has stated that social media does have a role in its algorithm that ranks businesses. This is because social media pages are indexed the same way as web landing pages, so social links are acknowledged as links. However, there was also a contradictory statement that social metrics do not contribute to ranking directly.

Microsoft representatives stated that their search engine, Bing, factors in the authority of social media platforms.

Earn With Link Building

Link building is traditionally done by creating individual links one at a time from different guest posts. However, link earning assists you in gaining multiple links from a single piece of content. That is only possible when your website has a vast number of subscribers, visitors, and a considerable following base.

This is where the benefit of social media kicks in. Most of the people you know will already have existing accounts with profiles that have hundreds of connections. This is precisely what makes this platform an easy way to reach the audience. Your content not only reaches your connections but the more engagement your post has, the more reach your post has with the hundreds of people outside your direct network.

However, engagement does not mean that your content has to be viral. Social media will have an impact on your rankings when your content will have quality over quantity.

InSight, In Mind – co-citation, co-occurrence, and brand authority

Out of sight, out of Mind. This is every brand’s nightmare. Brands need to remain relevant and in front of the mind. Marketing your brand on social media helps get your brand across to different people across multiple platforms. 

Being on different platforms leads to increasing co-citation and co-occurrence metrics due to mentions across the web.

While presence on social media creates awareness, being talked about also builds brand authority.

Impact of Social Media Profiles In Search Results

Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) are where social media profiles are delivered. This is also another direct indicator that your SERP presence relies on your social media presence as well. Search Engine Result Pages show branded search terms or keywords.

This is not a drawback, though. It just means that the digital marketing team of your brand needs to have a more holistic approach and strategize in such a manner that the branded keyword of your business results in a high click-through rate from search. 

In today’s day and age, our society is run by social media engagement. The number of followers likes, and comments matters significantly, which impacts authority as well. Thus, the results that come back on SERPs are not to be underestimated. The social media results for your branded keyword not only mean click-through rates but can also yield future conversions. 

Does Social Media Contribute To Ranking a Brand

While authority can be established with likes and shares, there are still problems attached to SERPs directly associating social metrics as a ranking factor. There is too much room for manipulation on social platforms, so search engines cannot entirely rely on them. Profiles can be fake, likes can be bought, and there is limited access for the bots to crawl social pages and understand authority. 

However, this will most likely change in the future, given that Google and Facebook are two giants of the online world, and their algorithms and bots will only get smarter with time and more relevant to the prevalent changes.

Ways Social Media Can Improve Your SEO Results

Marketers are strictly investing in social media marketing. This is because even though it may not be directly related, social media does connect with SEO.

If your business hasn’t already invested in social media marketing, the time to do that is now. First, improve SEO with social media using practical social media marketing tips. Your actions and efforts on social media should correspond with your SEO objectives.

To ensure you don’t lose traffic from either side, grasp a few social media and SEO integration tips.

Publish High-Quality Content

Google crawlers and search engine algorithms are advanced and developed to understand user intent, the relevance of content to the search, and quality. This enables Google users to get the most relevant content whenever they enter a search query.

Post Quality Over Quantity

Keyword stuffing might have slipped by in the past, but the advanced age is all for quality over quantity. Your content on social media and SEO will perform well if it is well researched and reader-oriented. 

Instead of worrying about publishing posts every day, focus on the material your readers are looking for. This will enable you to connect with them. Also, adding more valuable material to your content will outrank competitors and attract quality backlinks. As they say, quality content reigns supreme.

Sharing Your Content Should Be Easy For Users

Billions use social media for various reasons, but marketers only have one aim: to reach more consumers and create brand awareness and generate leads. This is why making sure that your content can be shared easily is essential. Your content must have social share buttons and compelling CTAs (call to action), as these are vital elements. CTAs also help your followers reshare your posts which gains you reach outside your connections.

Optimize Social Media Profiles

Potential clients or buyers always check a profile before getting in touch. This is why your profile needs to be compelling. It should have all the correct elements for your target audience. It should be aligned with your blog, website, and brand image. Your profile should also be optimized so when people search your brand up, you immediately appear on searches throughout the web and not just on Google.

The more well-optimized your social profile is, the easier it is for a target market and potential customers to find you online.

Optimize Images For Social and SEO

People respond to visual content faster than written content. This is why visuals are an essential aspect of marketing – it helps connect and communicate with a target audience and develop a brand tone. So, you need images optimized to gain popularity on social media as well as search results.

Build Relationships With Users Through Active Conversations

A Brand-customer alliance is a great way to increase engagement. It establishes credibility and trust between the customer and the business. Hence, you should take the initiative and discuss with the target audience on social groups, forums, and marketing profiles. You will quickly know their thoughts about your brand and understand their expectations from it as well, all while building a positive relationship.

Create Compelling Captions For Your Posts

Content plays an integral and crucial role in every marketing strategy. Good content pieces center around storytelling, are conversation starters for more engagement, or are compelling calls to action. While you are creating clear captions, be mindful of adding focus keywords and secondary keywords. Depending on the platform you are on, add keywords in the titles, add alt tags, use hashtags. Using an active voice also strengthens your stance but be smart enough to optimize content according to different social media platforms.

The Takeaway

As the landscape of social media changes, so does its relationship with different search engines and SEO practices. While it is still not clarified and is complicated even for the tech experts, the conclusion is that there is a correlation between social media and SEO rankings, even if social links are not a causation of the rankings.

Therefore, it’s best to follow some of the examples of industry giants and pave your way to success. You can combine several SEO, content, and social media marketing to reap the most benefits. However, a little more research before forming your strategies is always better!