Two powerful tools businesses of all types must use in today’s marketplace are search engine optimization (SEO) and social media marketing. Search engines and social media separately make up the vast majority of how customers look for goods and services.
How can SEO and social media work together? Peppermonkey Media, New Jersey’s top SEO company, can address the interaction of the two broad strategies to create a powerful synergy that can significantly enhance your brand’s online presence.
What Is Social SEO?
Social SEO describes the methods of using social media as an indirect tool to boost search visibility and organic search engine rankings.
Even though standard social signals like shares, likes, and comments do not directly impact SEO, they add to brand exposure. They also produce more backlinks and improved engagement rankings, which drive a website’s performance on leading search engines.
Content Sharing
Content sharing on the top social media platforms is essential to attracting valuable backlinks. When you post content people are interested in reading and interacting with, they are much more likely to share it with friends and followers.
The more high-quality backlinks you obtain, the better your chances of ranking higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Boosting Brand Awareness and Engagement
How can SEO and social media work together? Two key metrics where you can see objective results when marketing your business are improved brand awareness and engagement.
Brand Awareness
Social media platforms have become a leading method for building greater public brand awareness. If you develop successful strategies to increase your website’s visibility on social media, more people will visit and engage with your pages.
Research indicates that this type of increased brand awareness directly leads to more branded queries on search engines, which directly boosts SEO.
Engagement Metrics
You measure social media engagement through likes, shares, and comments. These metrics are strong indicators of how popular your content is with target audiences. An improved user experience leads to greater engagement with your website.
There is a correlation between social media engagement and reduced bounce rates and increased dwell time on company websites. Those signals resonate directly in search engine rankings.
Cross-Promotion Strategies
Cross-promotion is a marketing strategy that involves leveraging social media to promote SEO-optimized content and vice versa. An example of cross-promotion is using a successfully SEO-optimized blog post for SEO as part of a social media campaign that will, in return, drive traffic back to your website.
By the same token, social media posts that enjoy strong engagement can be repurposed as blog content to maximize the value of their success.
Be mindful of ways to get the most impact out of content that successfully engages audiences by redeveloping it on social media or in blog content.
Utilizing Different Social Media Platforms
All social media posts are not equal, and it’s critical that you understand how different platforms operate. Understanding the characteristics of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and others helps you develop content that will maximize engagement.
For example, visual-heavy and video content will perform much differently on Instagram than on other platforms. Likewise, professional and text-intensive content will perform better on LinkedIn than on other platforms.
Practical Strategies for Integration
Here are some valuable methods for strengthening SEO through social media.
Content Optimization for Social Sharing
The key to successful social media marketing comes from content sharing and backlinking. Content should have compelling headlines, engaging visuals, and well-defined calls to action to attract viewers scrolling through their social media feeds to engage.
At the same time, including prominent social media sharing buttons on your website will make it much easier for engaged visitors to share your content on their accounts.
Using Keywords in Social Media Posts
Of course, successful SEO centers around keyword research and usage. Incorporate powerful and relevant keywords into your social media posts to enhance their visibility in many types of search results. Specialized social media SEO tactics include using strong keywords in captions, hashtags, and descriptions.
The key is learning to strategically place keywords without stuffing them in order to rank higher in social media searches, and in turn, in SERPs.
Tracking and Analytics
Meaningful feedback is essential to developing a winning social media SEO strategy. Use tools like Google Analytics and work with Peppermonkey Media to obtain powerful insights into how well your campaigns convert leads and sales. Also, careful tracking of social media engagement promotes fine-tuning content for better engagement results.
Common Pitfalls and How To Avoid Them
Businesses make some common errors when using social media SEO techniques. How can SEO and social media work together? Here are a couple of things not to do.
Overloading Keywords
Keywords are absolutely essential, but they can be a double-edged sword when used carelessly. Stuffing, or overloading, keywords into content can lead to negative ratings from search engine algorithms. Unnatural or overuse of keywords and keyword phrases can produce poor readability scores and lead to ranking penalties from search engines.
Always use keywords naturally and as part of high-value, engaging content.
Ignoring Analytics
As mentioned above, social media SEO requires continuous and thoughtful analysis. If you do not have a meaningful understanding of which posts and content are producing results and which are not, you do not have any real way to know where to devote your marketing efforts.
Contact Peppermonkey Media To Learn More About the Combined Power of SEO and Social Media
How can SEO and social media work together? Integrating these two elements of a comprehensive digital marketing strategy will produce a reach and impact greater than the sum of the two working alone.
Our team of digital marketing experts can help develop a powerful integration between your SEO work and social media campaigns while avoiding common social media marketing mistakes.
Contact Peppermonkey Media online or call (732) 576-0171 today to schedule a free digital strategy session and learn how we can extend your company’s online reach to customers and clients. Discover how we can help.
