When you design your social media SEO strategy and social media content to work together, they can boost traffic to your website. However, they don’t just automatically do so. Your social media can even kill your site’s traffic if you don’t coordinate the two, according to New York Times best-selling author and top influencer on the web, Neil Patel.
An effective marketing strategy will ensure that they work together. All you need to do is focus your strategy on how social media and SEO content synergize.
Search Engine Algorithms Consider Social Backlinks
Although search engines credit social media backlinks less than website backlinks, you can use social media to get backlinks and place your content in front of high profile websites. Web design and development experts at Orbit Media Studios showed that despite search engine preference for links from non-social media pages, intelligent posting, and quality content can get you links and improve your search engine ranking.
Social Media Gets Traffic to Your Website
Social media certainly drive traffic to websites. The 2015 Shareaholic Social Media Traffic Report stated that the top eight social networks drove 31.24% of overall traffic to websites during their study period.
That’s what you want, assuming that your website has the content to hold and engage your new visitors. Page views and clicks affect your website’s bounce rate and time-on-site engagement metrics. By coordinating your website content, SEO, and social media you can work to improve your site’s search engine rank page (SERP).
Social Media Gets Your Brand in Front of Qualified Customers
Social media and SEO also function well together when you use the former to get your content, with backlinks to your website, out to channels viewed by influencers. There, if they see it and link to it on their sites, you have earned a high-quality link from an influential website. Search engine algorithms chalk up the points for that link!
Social media can help you improve awareness of your brand and your business’ authority in your niche. When your business posts enticing, relevant content regularly, with links back to content on your site, more qualified customers will find their way to your store, blog, or site.
More Metrics Help Focus Your Social Media SEO
You can use social media to help improve your website’s SEO. Not only do social media and SEO work together to get your keyword-rich content in front of readers quickly and inexpensively, but it provides a whole new set of engagement metrics, aside from your website analytics.
The number of shares, likes, and comments can provide quantitative data on which post topics and formats best engage viewers. Comments offer insight into the most engaged viewers. You’ll get even more metrics if you use tools like Facebook’s Pixel to remarket to your website traffic. By making it a monthly habit to review retweets, likes, comments, shares, pins, etc. you’ll quickly develop a valuable database to help you improve your SEO and social media marketing strategy.
Listen to Help You Communicate Value to Search Engines
Social media allows you to listen to your audience. What questions are your site visitors asking? What terms do they use? Do you use these terms in your social media SEO? What misconceptions do they express? Do they have problems that you can solve?
All of this information can help you realign your SEO and social media content marketing strategy. For example, suggested from Hootsuite, …
“If social sentiment about your brand abruptly changes one way or the other, you can dig into individual posts to get a sense of what you’ve done so very right—or wrong.”
By listening carefully, you can learn to speak with impact. You can also optimize your on-page content to satisfy Google’s new “snippet” requirements which can get you ranked above the #1 spot in Google. The questions your users are most asking are the perfect candidate keywords for Google Snippets placement.
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Understanding how social media and SEO work together can provide qualified customers with a social channel that funnels visitors to your website. Frequent, relevant, quality social media content, combined with an outstanding website make an unstoppable combination of your social media SEO strategy.