As a business owner or marketer, your job is to build a brand identity that will attract consumers to the products and services you offer. With over 4 billion people using the Internet, it is a business necessity to make sure your content is optimized, well-thought-out, and pertinent to your audience. How do you make the most of it? That is where the marriage of social media and SEO come into the picture.
Before we dive deep into their perfect love story, let’s have a short vocabulary lesson of what SEO actually means. SEO stands for search engine optimization, which is maximizing the number of people who visit your website by making sure it appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine (e.g. Google, Bing, Yahoo). For example, when you search for St. Louis Cardinals Baseball, the first three things to pop up on your search might be the direct link to the MLB website for their schedule, a link to one of their social media pages, and a link to a recent news story.
SEO not only helps you build a solid identity online with a good ROI (return on investment), but it also helps your consumers locate you when they type in simple keywords such as coffee shop near me, advertising agency St. Louis or country concert tickets.
When you mix social media and SEO, it helps build your brand identity, social reach, and increase your search rankings on search engines. The main reasons why they are attracted to one another are because of their similarities. Both are focused on content, love sharing, enjoy inbound links, and have a need to gain authority.
Content is what drives social and SEO to prime performance. If you do not have good content, then you will not attract followers and searches. Sharing is caring, but for social and SEO it also means more reach, engagement, impressions, and searches, especially if other people share your content. Inbound links are links from other websites that are embedded or attached to your content. These links add credibility to your content, incorporate your influencers, pull in your audience and gain the trust of your audience. Both social and search want to gain authority, which means more people are seeing, interacting and following your content. The more authority you gain, the more likely people will search and follow your website and social accounts.
Now, that you understand the harmonious relationship between search and social, how do you begin to connect them to your business?
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- Optimize your posts and profiles – Make your social accounts effective by making them mean something to your consumers. Think about how you can engage your followers to not only like your social content but also search for your business’s website!
- Use Hashtags – Hashtags help people find the content they are looking for because they are set up to be search queries or search shortcuts. If you click #baseball on social media platforms, they will immediately go to other posts that have also used that hashtag in their post. Use them often, but use them with intention!
- Incorporate Mentions and Tagging – Mentioning and tagging other businesses or followers helps you build relevance and signal influencers through social media and SEO. It helps increase your following on social and your searches online.
- Add Keywords to Content – Keywords are the words people might use to find your business when searching online. Know your keywords and incorporate those words when possible in your social media posts. Social posts on platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, and Facebook will often show up in search results when the proper keywords have been incorporated into the post copy.
Taking these small steps to connect your social media and SEO will increase your digital bandwidth and overall brand awareness in order to attract the consumers you want for your business.
