Welcome to Part 2 of our blog series, answering the question of whether social media impacts SEO. If you haven’t read part one, we highly recommend that you head to that blog post and read it first, as a lot of this post will not make sense if you haven’t.
The short answer to this question is that no social media has a direct impact. Rather, it has an indirect impact. This impact comes from content creation, social media shares, increasing brand awareness, and driving quality traffic to your website.
This week, we’ll be sharing 7 ways you can be successful in using social media to boost your SEO rankings:
- Publish high-quality content
- Make sharing your content easy for users
- Optimize your social media profiles
- Optimize your images for SCO and social media
- Actively communicate with your clients and build relationships
- Regularly evaluate your social media strategy and analytics
- Create compelling captions for your posts
1. Publish high-quality content
Content creation is a key aspect of any good SEO strategy. Since Google loves high-quality content that helps its users, this is the perfect place to start.
It can also help make social media posts easier and provide the perfect way to lead people back to your website. The key is making sure your content is genuinely useful to your social media followers. Otherwise, they won’t click onto your website or stay long on your content which can hurt your SEO.
Take your time before you publish content on your website. Does it help your audience? Does it solve a problem for them? Is it entertaining to them? If it isn’t something they could benefit from, it’s best not to publish it. Quality will always win out over quantity when it comes to blogging.
If you struggle to generate new content ideas, one easy trick is to revisit old blog posts. You can look for underperforming blogs and give them new life focusing on adding elements that will help your audience. You can beef them up with new statistics and information or make them more entertaining and relevant. You can also go back to your highest performing posts and tweak them to continue helping them succeed
2. Make sharing your content easy for users
Everyone uses social media differently, and they look for different posts. However, for small business owners, the primary goal should always be reaching new customers, building brand awareness, and growing trust with their current customers. One way to achieve these goals is to have your content be sharable.
It’s crucial that you make sure it’s easy for your customers to share your content so that you’re more likely to reach even more people. You can do this by creating engaging captions, using professional images, and ensuring your content is helpful. The higher quality of the content, the more likely people are to share it.
3. Optimize your social media profiles
Your social media profiles should be optimized the same way your website or Google business profile is. With many potential customers researching businesses on social media before they make purchases, you want to put your best foot forward.
It is important that you make sure that your profiles are compelling, descriptive, and easily searchable. In addition, make sure your information is up-to-date and the same across all your profiles so customers can easily tell it’s your profile. You’ll also want to make sure that your content reflects your brand voice and reflects the quality and consistency of content your website does.
4. Optimize your images for SEO and social media
Statistics show that social media posts with images receive 2.3 times more engagement than those without photos. As a result, it’s a key part of many social media platforms like Instagram. Therefore, ensuring that you have high-quality photos is key to leveraging social media to increase your SEO rankings.
You can optimize your images by:
-Naming them descriptively for visually impaired users.
-Making sure they’re the right image format and size for each platform.
-Making sure the file size isn’t too large.
-Adding appropriate and relevant keywords to the alt text.
-Ensuring they are high quality: not blurry, not pixelated, etc.
5. Actively communicate with your clients and build relationships
What is the point of social media if you aren’t being social? Social media comes down to so much more than just posting. For businesses especially, they must communicate with clients in many ways. Responds to comments and DMS and also take the time to comment on user photos and engage with them. This will build trust and help increase your brand awareness online.
You can even create custom groups of your customers on platforms like Facebook. This can then foster a sense of community and provide customers a safe place to come and ask questions about your product or services.
On platforms like Instagram, you can get creative by using stories and videos to create polls, ask relevant questions, and understand your customer even better. This is a free and easy way to understand your target audience and increase engagement.
6. Regularly evaluate your social media strategy and analytics
Since social media is constantly changing, your strategy will also need to change. In 2021 we saw the rise of video content with major platforms like Instagram making major shifts towards video. Companies who didn’t get behind Instagram reels have seen a major dip in their analytics as Instagram now favors video content to photos.
You must regularly analyze your social media analytics, sales conversions, and followers. You cannot ensure that you are successful on social media without measuring your marketing metrics.
There are several ways you can analyze your metrics through social media, including in-app analytics, customer engagement, sales conversion numbers through Google Analytics, and testing out new approaches. The best part about taking the time to do this is that it often can influence your SEO strategy to reach customers better all-around online.
7. Create compelling captions for your posts
We’ve said it before, and we will say it again, content is king. To be more specific high-quality content is king. Just like you need to make sure that your blog posts are engaging, entertaining, or helpful to your customers, you also need to make sure that your captions are as well.
You can achieve captivating captions in a variety of ways:
-Tell a story
– Ask your audience a specific question
– Provide helpful tips
– Share a funny antidote
The better your captions are, the more likely your users will engage with your content, share it with others, and click on your website when prompted. As we discussed in part one of this blog series, this has a huge impact on your SEO goals.
We hope this two-part series on social media and SEO has helped open your eyes to the world of opportunity awaiting you in your online marketing strategies. While social media does not directly impact your SEO, it undoubtedly impacts it overall. You will need each one of these seven tools we gave you today to make sure that you are leveraging social media in a way that can boost your SEO rankings.
For more helpful SEO and social media tips, we would love for you to head to the main Fusion One Marketing blog. It is chock full of helpful articles and how to use them to have the best marketing strategy possible in 2022.