Guestpost: 8 Fresh Ways to Leverage Social Media In SEO in 2021

This is guestpost from our friends at Loganix

The potential to grow your business with social media is growing every year.

Facebook has over 2.89 billion monthly active users. Instagram has over 1 billion, Pinterest, Twitter, and LinkedIn, you see everywhere.

And businesses of all shapes and sizes are leveraging social media to increase traffic and sales.

Now it’s time to get you started.

In this article you will learn how to combine social media into your SEO strategy.

Good content is the price of entry, but a clear plan for distribution gets you results. Even with the best content, if you can’t back it with a good SEO, social media, and PR strategy, you won’t see good results. If people can’t find it, it can’t spread. Now you might be wondering…

Does Social Media Directly Impact SEO?

Source: https://cdn.cognitiveseo.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Social-Signals-Influence-SEO--1024x570.png

Google has repeated on several occasions that it does not take the number of social media shares, followers, or likes as ranking factors across the web.

But just because Google ignores a few profile metrics doesn’t mean social media doesn’t benefit SEO. To start:

• When you push content across social media and people engage with it, you amplify your reach.
• When more people engage with your content, you build more authority.
• And the previous two together help get you in front of your target audience.

Combined with content on your site that’s been driven by effective keyword research, an SEO flywheel is created—an SEO strategy that will work forever.

8 Effective Ways to Combine Social Media and SEO

Once you understand the value of social media for your SEO strategy, it’s time to add it to your mix. And if you want to take your marketing strategy to the next level, we made a list of growth hacking tools to boost your eCommerce sales.

Now let’s get started.

1. Create New Link Opportunities (with Social Promotion)

When you build a presence online, you’ll inevitably create more opportunities for connections. And in this world backed by the internet, you win by being more connected.

Social promotion is limited only by your creativity, from branded hashtags to giveaways. Just make sure you show up with what your audience wants to see. And did you know there’s seven types of content you can use for SEO?

2. Create Keyword-Focused Social Media Content

Knowing what your audience is searching for and crafting content directly for that intent is essential to reaching the people you seek to serve.

Keyword Research focuses on just that—finding what customers are searching for. And when you show up when they go looking with a story that they want to hear, in a way they’re eager to understand, you make an impact. You can even repurpose content on your blog to cross promote across social media platforms. And to support future blog content, you can use social media to find what keywords your audience uses.

To learn what makes a keyword valuable, you’ll need to learn about essential keyword metrics and what tools you can use to find them.

3. Personalize Your Content

Every act of communication should be personal. To do this right, you need to understand what your ideal customers want—ideal because the content you create determines the customers you attract.

What does your audience want? How can you best convey your message to them? Do they understand what you’re offering?

This would be easy if everyone thought the way you do. You have to understand why other people choose you, why other people don’t choose you, and what you have to offer them.

Today, email newsletters provide the most personalization opportunities, from personal names in subject lines to segmenting entire catalogs of products by interest. Email is powerful, and here to stay. You can expand the life of content on your blog by repurposing it into an email newsletter. Aggregating user-generated content from popular leaders in your industry on social media and sending it out as newsletters can work too.

4. Monitor Social Media (for Content Ideas)

Do you want to find out what people think about your brand, resolve customer queries faster, join the conversation about your brand, or stay updated on market changes? Then you need to learn how to track and monitor social media.

When you start monitoring social media, you can track your brand performance and discover what your audience reads, watches, listens to, and follows. Then leverage these insights to create better content, inform your social media marketing, and better engage your audience.

When you identify where your audience spends time and attention, you give your marketing efforts the information they need to become more targeted and effective. Monitoring your social media will help you find better content ideas for your business.

5. Test Content Performance (with Social Media Ads)

Source: https://www.statista.com/chart/16099/social-media-advertising-revenue-in-the-united-states/

You can quickly test how well your content performs by running social media ads through a targeted keyword. Doing this will quickly boost its views and allow you to see how well people engage with it.

Getting started with advertising for small businesses can be overwhelming. The variety of different advertising approaches can quickly put you into paralysis. If you want to stay on top of your business, aim to understand the principles behind campaigns. Channels come and go, but principles remain. Understand the strategy, communication, behavior, and psychology of what brings meaningful growth.

6. Engage With Your Audience

Source: https://www.statista.com/chart/6579/how-to-measure-audience-engagement-online/

You need to attract and engage people who’ll subscribe, link, and help spread what you have to offer. Take your time and tell a story. You have opportunities to engage with people every day, don’t talk at them, communicate the information that they want.

Engage with the culture by focusing on building and crafting a story that will resonate. Understand that it’s your job to serve that culture, to engage with it, and make change happen.

7. Improve Branded Searches (and Lower Bounce Rate)

There are only ten positions on the front page of Google, but there’s an infinite number of front pages.

SEO is about making the most of people searching for you—to organically pull in more qualified leads.

Your goal is to have a few people care enough about you and what you do to search directly for you. And when a few people care enough to look for you instead of a generic alternative, you’ve got a brand.

Bounce rates primarily come from people looking for alternatives. Often, the information they saw wasn’t the information they were looking for, so they bounced. When people search directly for you, bounce rates will lower because they’re not looking for alternatives.

Share what you have that’s worth making and your story worth telling on social media, and you’ll boost your brand searches by leveraging social proof. You’ll have a group of people who care enough to make it happen.

Not sure how to build your brand on social media? Look no further than Shelter CBD’s Instagram for inspiration:

Follow Shelter CBD’s lead and post a mix of:

• Product shots to showcase what you do
• Customer photos to personalise your brand
• Content that will resonate with, entertain, or inspire your target audience

8. Build Strategic Partnerships

Posting regularly on social media will eventually lead to building an audience. An audience is a brand’s greatest asset—valuable precisely because it takes time to develop. If it happened quickly, it wouldn’t be a sustainable advantage.

Leverage it. It’s the most valuable asset between a brand and its customers. How can you leverage it? By offering other brands opportunities to reach your audience and reaching out to other brands to offer things their audience would find valuable.

Strategic partnerships can be found between brands that can provide each other an opportunity to be seen by their respective audiences. A common example being one partner provides prizes for a giveaway. What you offer is limited only by your creativity, but make sure both parties benefit.

For strategic social media partnership examples, check out our pick of the best influencer marketing examples.

Best Practices for Social Media SEO

Ideas aren’t worth much without execution, and execution isn’t worth much without the right strategy. Creating social media content can quickly spread you too thin to work on the strategy, so it’s critical to stay on top of the never-ending content by utilizing a content calendar. Now here’s a quick list to get the most SEO value out of your social media content:

• The most timeless advice that works: publish incredibly valuable content. Creating great content will get you far.
• To go the rest of the way, you need to create shareable content and make sharing it easy.
• Make sure your profile furthers the goals of both you and your customers. Everything from your bio to your profile photo should help create an environment that is most conducive to your goal.
• Make sure your images are accessible for both people and crawlers.
• Engage with the culture by focusing on building and crafting a story that will resonate.
• Measure your social media performance to course-correct your strategy and inform future tactics.

Summary

There is an incredible opportunity to grow your business through social media. When you combine social media and SEO, you will pull in more qualified leads organically. Furthermore, follow the eight ways to combine social media and SEO listed here, and you’ll have everything in place for both Google and customers to favor you over the competition.

If you want to see more of the opportunity available for growing your business, check out our pick of over 110 great marketing strategy examples.