Many business owners and marketers are still trying to figure out whether or not social media can help the SEO of a certain website or blog. What can be said for sure is that there is no direct influence between the two, but there is definitely some indirect impact. Here is how you can use social media to get the maximum result with your SEO strategy.
Related Post: 4 Ways Through Which Social Media Could Help Grow Your Brand
Contents
How SEO and Social Media Are Related
SEO and social media are related to each other even though they don’t have a direct influence on one another. Here is the process that you could track in some way:
- Publishing: First, you publish content on your website or blog. It should be informative, interesting, and engaging. Your readers have to be motivated to actively interact with it in some way and move to the next stage.
- Sharing: Your content is linked to other blogs and websites as well as shared on social media. This can only happen if your content is valuable enough that people make the effort of sharing it with others.
- Growth: Thanks to these shares and links from other sites, your social media account starts growing and collecting followers. At the same time, your site gets more traffic as people visit the original article to read it.
- Community: With your follower base growing and the amount of your traffic increasing, your community starts growing too. Not only your social media profile but also your brand starts gaining a following.
- Reputation: You interact with this community and show that you are willing to listen to your current and potential clients. Consequently, your reputation improves over time and more people recognize you.
- Rankings: Because your community often visits your website and it gets more traffic, search engines notice it and start ranking your website higher. This doesn’t usually happen instantly and takes time.
- Discovery: Your site gets discovered in search results and starts getting traffic this way too. Then, you go back to the first step and the process repeats itself. However, some steps might change every time you get to the first step.
Search Rankings and Social Media
As you can see from the process, there is no direct influence of social media on your search rankings. As far as any expert can tell you, search engines don’t really take into account social shares when ranking pages. At least, not now and not yet.
Nevertheless, by paying attention to your social media, you will be able to indirectly influence your SEO. The process is lengthy and you won’t be able to track every stage, but there will definitely be some kind of impact one way or the other.
Reaching Foreign Audiences
One of the most interesting aspects of online marketing is that you can reach foreign audiences much more easily than you would with traditional marketing. This is why using your social media reach to get the word out about your business is so important.
Use an online translation service like The Word Point to translate your content into the languages spoken in the regions you want to target. Then, publish this content on your social media or even directly on your website. In fact, you could even translate your website entirely to make it more accessible to your international customers.
SEO and Social Media Best Practices
Now that you understand the logic behind the relationship between social media and search engine optimization, it is time to talk about the best practices for the two. Here are some things you can do to maximize the result of your SEO strategy with the help of your social media campaign:
- Make Social Media Sharing Easy: The first thing you must do is make the social media sharing process as easy as possible. Modern people are always busy and don’t have the time to share something even if they enjoyed reading the article. In fact, more often than not they simply skim through it. This is why social media sharing buttons have to be available on your website and visible to anyone.
- Optimize Social Media Profiles: The next extremely important step is to optimize your social media profiles. If your website looks stunning but your social media pages don’t, then there will be fewer people willing to follow you because they will think you are not worth it. Fill in all the blanks you can and try to make your profiles as appealing as possible.
- Participate in Conversations: Now, you need to start getting the word out about yourself and your brand. Start conversations on social media and participate in the ones that are already going on. If you see a post with an interesting question, reply to it in the comments or reply to the comments that are already there. If you find relevant communities or groups, join them and actively talk to other people.
- Collaborate with Others: Being a lone wolf might be tempting but collaborating with other brands can prove to be more effective in the long run. Find other brands or influencers to collaborate with. You could host a competition or a giveaway that could also kickstart your campaign by getting the word out to as many people as possible.
- Create a Posting Schedule: Social media is a tricky place that can make you famous fast but can also leave you forgotten among all the other numerous posts published daily. This is why you need to have a posting schedule to upload content regularly with post scheduling tools like NetBase, Buffer and social pilot. Don’t forget to include some guidelines for yourself too regarding the quality of your content, the hashtags you use, and so on.
- Measure Your Performance: Last but not least, measure your performance regularly to see how well your content is doing and whether or not it is having the impact you want it to have. If something isn’t working, it means you are doing it wrong and have to find something different to do instead or find a different approach to the matter.
Final Thoughts
All in all, there are many social media tactics that can help you improve your general SEO, but you need to be able to set apart what works and what doesn’t. Follow the advice in this article and you will notice a significant improvement in your SEO campaign.
Author Bio:
William Rodgers is a freelance writer and blogger. As he speaks several foreign languages, William’s main focus is writing SEO articles for businesses which want to drive their brand in the international market. His goal is to continually help more marketers fill Google search results with content that really matters. Feel free to contact him here https://twitter.com/William81597390