Is It Important To Have A Social SEO Strategy?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and social media can appear to be two different branches of digital marketing. But, there are many ways that these can support each other.
The ultimate goal of SEO is to drive traffic to your website, and the aim of social media is to build brand awareness and create disruptive marketing in what is essentially a personal space.
In this blog, we look at social SEO and consider whether these two can function as the perfect pair for promoting your website or blog.
What is social SEO?
Social SEO is a concept that came about when marketers realised that website rankings could improve by posting links on social media. They are two different branches of digital marketing merged, and here is a preliminary definition of them both.
Social media is a networking tool that encourages people to engage with their contacts and share content with a broader audience. Social media marketing has always been disruptive, and it is now striving to be more informative and well-targeted.
SEO (search engine optimisation) is a process to increase the quantity and quality of website traffic. How? For example, if many people search ‘cafe’ instead of ‘restaurant,’ an SEO expert will know to include ‘cafe’ as a keyword for an article on a website and its meta descriptions. Improve post copy with extensive research on best keywords to increase the probability of the website appearing in search results.
Does Google care about social signals?
The relationship between social and SEO has always been a grey area. There are three main approaches to the connection between the two:
- No connection: Many consider that social media and SEO are poles apart and have no effect on each other.
- Direct connection: Some believe that social signals positively affect the SEO rankings of any website.
- Indirect connection: Many think that social media can indirectly impact SEO.
Why is SEO important in social media?
Using SEO keywords in social media copy can hugely benefit their visibility on search engines and therefore reach and impressions within the channel.
Using SEO keywords in post copy benefits the audience searching using those keywords on social channels. Using them as hashtags would increase the likelihood of appearing in people’s searches even further.
Good website traffic indicates that your brand has the potential to gain a wider audience for its social handles. Redirecting them to your social channels with relevant and visible buttons on the website will increase followers across all media.
Good SEO will also help you create better social media content, as it provides better insights into what the audience is after.
Does social media impact SEO rankings?
We need not debate whether social media and SEO are correlated. There are many indirect ways social media marketing can impact your website’s rankings.
- Awareness: The most obvious one is brand awareness. The more aware people are of your brand, and the more they see it on social media, the more likely they will click through to your website when they see it in search results.
- Targeted audience: An effective social media posting and boost strategy can help your content reach the audience in the right location and field of work – this is the target audience. With this, more people are likely to click through to your website, thus increasing traffic.
- Indexing: Whenever you share on social media, this indicates a new website that needs to be indexed and crawled. The more times it is shared on social, the more alerts it may receive – improving the likelihood of achieving its indexing purpose.
- Knowledge: Social media also provides more insights into what people are interested in seeing. This way, social media can become a soundboard for the audience, and the website optimises according to the target audience and their needs. Social insights can also help improve SEO titles and meta descriptions.
- Link building: A link on social media is not the equivalent to a backlink on a website – but as discussed before, it does help increase awareness. Many people ‘save’ articles on social media and revisit the posts later. It also indicates that the brand recall value created by social media is essential.
- Community building: A social media presence is vital to help the audience connect with the brand. When a brand engages with queries, they appear responsive and create a loyal customer base, who will be more likely to revisit the website in the future.
Tips for improving your social media with SEO
- Keep your social buttons on the top of your articles. Audiences will be more inclined to hit ‘share’ when they can easily spot the buttons.
- Write articles following social media trends to increase the virality of the content. Tapping into social media patterns and directions will help you generate newer and more ‘current’ content.
- Follow a social media content calendar strategy for publishing new content. This strategy can include recycling older blog posts to keep the website traffic consistent.
- Generate partnerships with fellow brands to increase chances of link building.
- Listen to your audience on social media to find out what they want to see more
We are a full-service digital marketing agency, and we can support you on SEO and social media marketing. Contact us today.
