It cannot be denied how large the impact of social media has become. Social media has become an integral part of our life, as well as that of businesses. Specifically, social media plays a huge role in modern-day marketing. Social networking sites have truly evolved from being just a platform to connect with your friends, into a channel that is tapped by even the biggest names in any industry.
Meanwhile, search engine optimization is another way to do marketing in the digital age. It’s an attempt to ensure that you will appear first when you a user search for keywords related to your business.
These two can actually work together, giving you a holistic campaign.
How to Leverage Social Media for SEO
Social media is a great and effective marketing tool that is used by a lot of businesses. Unbeknownst to some, social media can work hand-in-hand with other digital marketing techniques such as search engine optimization. While social media marketing and search engine optimization are two different digital marketing strategies, there is convergence with the two, where social media can magnify SEO.
Here are 5 ways on how social media can power up your SEO strategy:
You can earn do-follow backlinks
Not everyone knows it, but social media is actually an important ranking factor.
A lot of users are also able to find their way to new sites by links on their news feed. You can definitely do this too.
You can also come up with content that can be picked up by social media influencers, related companies, or bloggers.
According to a top SEO Toronto company, one good way to earn backlinks is by mentioning influential people on your content in that you will post. If you do this regularly, you may earn backlinks from these people, boosting your content’s reach, and increasing your visitors as well.
Mentions without links are also important
In some cases, you will be mentioned in other people’s content without a link. This is okay as search engines can recognize this and would definitely boost your ranking. Your focus should be on the creation of high-quality content that is worth being referenced to by others.
You may not have earned backlinks, but link less mentions are considered implied backlinks, and this now has the same weight as to a mention that makes use of links.
Social Media Profiles appear in Google’s Search Result
When you do a search on Google, there is a high probability that the first few you’ll see our social media profiles. If you are very active and posts a lot, and have lots of followers, then more of your social media profile may show on the search engine results page.
However, it is said that the number of social media signs you get on your page do not matter. What matters is the quality of the content you publish, and how users perceive it.
As a practice, make sure that you update your business’ information on your social media profile is updated. Make sure that you have the right name, address, and URL of your website. Also, ensure that you have high-quality photos for your profile picture and for that for your cover photo. This little stuff can help attract more users to click on your link. You’ll also have to learn to be responsive on social media sites to help maximize the engagements you can make out of it.
Use Social Media for SEO-related Research
You can make use of social media to help on your research for your SEO strategies. This includes keyword search, content ideation, and competitor analysis, among others. These tasks can help you strategize your SEO initiative.
You can find effective keywords in social media. Check for hot topics, and check what’s trending. Make use of these keywords and you’re bound to boost your SEO. You can also come up with content regarding such topics and you might just earn a lot of visits, and when done right, might also trend it its own right.
Finally, you may check the social media sites of your competitors to see what they’re doing, so you can benchmark your initiatives against theirs. It’s a smart move to always know what your competitors are doing, so you can always come up with better moves than theirs.
Other search engines, such as Bing, didn’t (publicly) say “no” to social signals.
While it is clear that Google doesn’t give much weight to social signals, the case is not true for other search engines such as Bing.
In 2010, the social authority of a user is said to be an important ranking factor. No change has been declared regarding this so far, and it does not seem to have changed until this date.
So our suggestion: make sure that you improve on both social media signals as well as the quality of your content to ensure that you would really be on the right track.