Social media is an excellent way to enhance SEO rankings. The more shares your posts receive, the more the algorithm will push your content for more people to see, thereby impacting your SEO.
However, improving SEO rankings doesn’t happen by chance. It requires strategic content marketing and the proper techniques. Therefore, this article explains six main ways to harness social media for SEO rankings.
Let’s get started.
How to harness social media for SEO
When leveraging social media to improve SEO rankings, there are specific tips to adopt. Let’s examine them below:
- Go live
Many people watch live videos because it’s exciting, real-time, and the perfect way to connect with brands. Statistics show that 82% of customers prefer live videos from a brand to social posts. Therefore, you can meet your audience’s needs by going live regularly.
Live videos generate more interactions because they are direct and personal. Audiences can ask brands questions and receive immediate responses. As a result, the conversation flows, leading to higher engagement that boosts SEO.
So, capitalize on live videos to build relationships with customers, as it will help with long-term engagement. For example, utilizing live videos and video prospecting means you can relate better with your audience, enabling you to establish a good connection between them.
This comes with long-term benefits as they will engage with future posts and share the content across several platforms, impacting SEO. Harness live videos by creating them around promotions and other significant events like a product launch.
This doesn’t mean you can’t go live randomly, but being strategic with it is more beneficial. For example, the audience is likely to be excited if they know you are launching a new product, offering giveaways, or other promotions. Also, When it comes to engagement and attracting new followers, hardly anything works as great as giveaways. It’s also best to notify your followers ahead to allow them to plan toward it.
Perform a countdown to boost anticipation and serve as a reminder. Furthermore, live videos are great for SEO as they are an excellent source for quality engagement when done correctly.
Finally, you can go live on different social platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, etc and communicate with your Instagram followers face to face. UNUM offers great tips when going live on TikTok. If you want to monetize your video content, you can also opt to create your own live streaming website.
If you intend to use a webcam, don’t forget to conduct a mic and webcam test to ensure high-quality live video. Also, you can use services to integrate live streaming functionality directly into your website or even your standalone apps. This is easier than building a bespoke solution from scratch in-house. It also gives you extensive control over how this feature works. So if you want to add live chat functionality, for example, that’s more than possible.
Just make sure that your efforts to go live aren’t an afterthought. If the rest of your site is well optimized and on-point, but your video content is amateurish, it will put off your audience, rather than engage them. Bring in live streaming experts if you’re new to this scene.
- Measure your brand awareness with tools
Tracking brand awareness is crucial to improving SEO rankings. By identifying how much your target audience understands what your brand does and what it stands for, you can channel your marketing effort appropriately.
You will reach your target audience strategically and offer the right message, ultimately boosting website traffic. Measuring brand awareness gives insight into what those who know you crave.
This gives you a scope into who to target and the information they need to become fully aware of your business. Ultimately, this impacts your inbound and outbound marketing efforts as you can provide relevant content and promote your brand to the right people.
Tracking brand awareness doesn’t always require a technical process. Use simple tools to measure brand awareness.
For example, distribute online surveys and sms surveys across your target audience. This survey should contain simple questions to test if they recognize your brand, are aware of its offerings, and what makes it stand out.
Secondly, use other SEO tools like social media insights on followers, reach, and engagement metrics. Followers’ numbers show how many people know your brand on social media. Reach shows you how many people view your content, and engagement reveals the people who interact with your brand.
Monitoring these insights gives scope to online presence and those who know the business. Doing this also allows you to intensify and channel your marketing strategy to the right areas.
Should you conduct campaigns to increase followers? Post social content at peak times to expand the reach? Or create relevant content consistently to boost engagement? Performing regular brand awareness audits and a strategized social media posting schedule will help you grow your business visibility. This translates to several potential benefits that influence SEO rankings.
For instance, impressive brand awareness portrays you as an authority in your field, increasing your shares and linking similar businesses to you. Consequently, it increases web traffic, providing better-qualified leads to your business.
- Optimize your social media profile
A business’s social media profile is essential when enhancing SEO rankings. Optimizing social media bios is how your target audience will quickly locate you on social media and Google. Over 70% of small businesses use social media, and 64% of small companies have a website.
So, optimizing your social media accounts is critical for potential customers to notice you amid the competition. Rank your social media account by asking the following questions:
- What keywords are prospective customers likely to search when looking for my business online?
- What type of information/questions are they asking?
- What keywords are my competitors ranking for?
Find the correct answers to these questions and input them on your social media descriptions.
Most social platform profiles require limited characters, so ensure to include the most prominent keywords. This way, your business can rank among the top searches when consumers search for companies in your industry. Managing numerous accounts for social media can be a bit hectic, so you can give a chance to such tools as password managers. It would help to keep all login details in one place in order to avoid any possible confusion and inconvenience.
- Refine social media images for SEO
Posting compelling social media images goes beyond high resolution, size, and how engaging they are. Although these factors are essential, you must consider how you set up and insert pictures, especially when ranking for SEO.
These factors are critical to helping the algorithm optimize your content. Therefore, consider the following when creating images for social media platforms:
- Image File Names: Optimize your image titles with the relevant keywords audiences are looking for. The algorithm examines these titles to rank posts. Preferably, use hyphenated keywords to different separate keywords for SEO rankings.
- Alt Tags: Alt tags are HTML codes inserted in images that help algorithms understand an idea. So, include Alt Tags to improve rankings further.
- Unique Images: Stock images may be convenient, but many businesses already use them. So they don’t help your brand stand out. To avoid this, use images that are unique to your brand. This will reduce competition and increase your chances of ranking top on search lists.
Although often neglected, images also play a vital role in optimizing posts. So, while making photographs clear, engaging, and professional, include keywords in titles, add alt tags and use unique photos.
- Produce quality, targeted content
Effective content marketing is one of the most efficient ways to grow businesses on social media. This means creating content your audience finds valuable, engaging, and exciting to consume. It also means cutting down on promotional posts and focusing on providing value.
Understand your customers’ needs and create content that meets them. Also, deliver the content in the format the audience likes.
Do they prefer live videos with lengthy captions? Infographics over random images? Always consider their expectations and deliver accordingly. They will interact with your posts effectively, increasing your rankings.
- Link your social media to your website
Connecting social media platforms to the website is one of the easiest ways to increase footfall on your e-commerce store. You can do these in several ways. First, place your website URL on your social media profile or description.
Direct them to visit the e-commerce store to shop for items, read blog posts, leave reviews, etc. Post snippets of your blog post on social media and encourage your followers to visit the website and read.
Post items on social media and inform them to visit your website to shop. Many people are very active on social media, so maximize this advantage and promote your website on these platforms.
Reasons to leverage social media for SEO
There are several advantages to harnessing social media for increased rankings. Let’s discuss some of these reasons below:
- It facilitates the content promotion
Social media is an excellent platform for promoting content. You can distribute posts using a social media scheduler from your website and publicize them on your social media platforms. Additionally, your posts receive shares and other engagement to enhance brand awareness, improving website traffic.
The more quality content you produce, the more people will stick around to read it, increasing the on-site engagement and reducing the bounce rate. This communicates to the algorithm that you are providing value to your audience. It also pushes your posts further to a broader audience.
Inserting relevant keywords and providing content customers need also lets you rank among the top results when consumers conduct searches. Therefore convert your website content to social media posts and drive the traffic back to your site.
- It promotes engagement
Maximizing social media by delivering valuable content will increase engagement significantly. Engagement boosts online reputation and signifies to the algorithms that your content is worth promoting.If you upload you posts on social media using social media scheduler, you get a higher chance to boost your engagement. You can opt for alternatives to buffer for better social media scheduler. This nurtures brand visibility by ranking your page and content.
- It encourages link building
Providing helpful content attracts customers to your brand and projects you as a valuable part of your industry. Since your content is relevant and solves people’s problems, other companies are likely to link to it on their websites. These external links to your content increase your reach. It also communicates your authority to Google for ranking.
Conclusion
Social media is an effective tool to optimize SEO as a business. It increases content interaction and brand recognition and encourages footfall on your website. So channel social media for SEO by live streaming, using brand visibility tools, and optimizing descriptions and images. Additionally, produce helpful posts and promote your website on social media.
