Your SEO Services Guide To Social Signals:
Usually, SEO services and social media marketing are two separate conversations. This is due to the fact that social media can seem more organic, focused on engaging and building more meaningful relationships between brand and audience, while SEO can seem more based on science and analytics with a stronger focus on keywords and SERP rankings. But when we successfully merge these two facets of inbound marketing, as this SEO Services Guide highlights, the results can be powerful.
Not sure where to begin? Don’t worry, in this SEO Services Guide we will be taking you through exactly how social media for SEO works and some strategies that can assist you in integrating your marketing across both platforms.
Unpacking Social Media SEO Services
Basically, social media SEO services are all about optimising your social platforms to attract more customers via search. And although SEO services best practices may vary from platform to platform, this SEO Services Guide explains that the goal is always to tap into the right audience and then introduce them to your products to buy.
Even though social media and SEO services will still have two different strategies, they can still complement each other in a way that drives sales traffic from a variety of sources. People are now reporting finding new products/brands on social media rather than traditional search engines. Even more interestingly, more people are reporting that they prefer social media to a brand’s website and would rather make purchases directly through the applicable app.
It is clear that social media has become a powerful and important tool for businesses, but as this SEO Services Guide explains, social media still serves a different purpose to search engines and therefore they need to be considered specifically for that application. However, the lines are blurring, and fast.
With that being said, let’s get into some social media SEO strategies below, as covered in this SEO Services Guide:
1. Your Website’s Social Media Sharing Buttons
Many businesses and websites often see the inclusion of these buttons as clutter and unnecessary, but if placed strategically, they can be really effective. For example, inserting buttons that allow users to share your blog post easily can really increase brand visibility and higher traffic as a result.
2. Integrating Keywords Across Platforms
The lines between social media and search engines are increasingly blurring, so why not try using the keyword strategy you have for your website for your social media profiles too? It makes sense from a user-intent point of view to do this.
For instance, on apps like TikTok, keywords like “how to…” and “what is…” with an index value of ten would be a great place to start.
Create a list of these words and then start carefully crafting social media content around them, but don’t just overload your posts with the max number of keywords you’ve identified. This SEO Services Guide advises incorporating them thoughtfully, and this will help to increase your reach.
To correctly identify the right keywords for each platform, this SEO Services Guide recommends the following:
1. Think about phrases and associated things people might use to describe your product/service or when they can’t remember its actual name. Like for productivity tools, users might first think of “calendar app”, and these relational terms can make up effective keywords and phrases.
2. Opt to go for more specific terms when there is a lot of competition around keywords can help you stand out from the noise.
3. Diversify your keywords when necessary – for example if you are offering discounts, make sure you utilise that by including related keywords such as “best deals”, “big discounts”, “discount app” etc.
4. Revisit older keywords that performed well for website SEO, they may also do well on social platforms too.
5. Ensure your keywords are relevant to the social media platform, think about Linkedin being more career related where Facebook would be more social.
3. Links that appear on Social Media profiles
Links that appear on social media profiles are no-follows so most SEOs believe they don’t pass any link equity and thus believe they wouldn’t move the ranking needle.
But before you write this off as pointless, there are two things worth noting. Firstly, the idea that no-follow links are useless is completely false. Yes, they may not boost your site’s authority, but that’s not the only thing that matters is it? They still drive traffic and brand visibility attracting potential new customers.
Secondly, when used correctly, no-follow links won’t harm your site, but can actually improve your SERP ranking and even protect you from penalties.
This is not to be confused with URL’s in your actual bio of a social media profile as this is a follow link and should be treated as such.
4. Links in Video and Presentation Content
Video based, short form content apps like TikTok and Instagram Reels have become the highest ROI earners. This SEO Services Guide explains how utilising this content format and sharing links with it can really improve engagement and subsequently, site traffic.
There are two ways to go about this:
1. Embedding where allowed in your main social media profile or in the post itself.
2. The description area also provides a valuable area to install a link.
Providing this extra information/resources to your audience in this way is a great way to boost engagement with your products or services.
5. Optimising Your Social Media Profiles
A good way to wrap your head around this is just to think of your social media profiles as extensions of your website itself.
You are probably used to optimising your different web pages around titles and keywords… well this is the same thing, and ensures your social profiles are speaking correctly to your website optimisation strategy.
Optimisation tips:
– Ensure you have a profile picture and use high resolution images across all your content. Establishing an identity is key.
– Regularly update things like your cover photo on Facebook, X, and LinkedIn as per event announcements or new releases.
– Add your social media badges to your web pages and even your email signature to ensure you don’t miss out on anyone trying to keep up with what you are doing.
– Use SEO-friendly keywords especially in your About, Services, and Product pages, but remember only the first 140 – 160 characters of the meta descriptions show up in search results, so make sure you get straight to the point.
– Use the biographical description areas to link to your website whenever you can.
– If possible, verify your account so that it receives a verification badge. This is a sure way to establish trust with your audience and authority in your industry.
6. How social media reach can affect link building efforts
Links have been important for SEO from the beginning. Social media reach offers additional channel growth to syndicate versions of your content in order to garner new eyes on the content and therefore new link earning opportunities, depending on the value of the content of course.
This metric has to do with the number of fans, followers, and accounts your content is reaching, either directly or indirectly through shares and likes etc.
The more followers you have, the larger your reach. However, don’t fall into the trap of buying fake followers or likes, as these will not increase your engagement, and will probably end up penalising your account more than it actually helps. Instead, be committed to producing high quality content that grows your audience organically.
7. Fostering Relationships
Just like a traditional sales model, building and maintaining relationships is super important for business. Social media now makes that easier, providing more opportunities to connect with people, brands and businesses both locally and across the globe. This means increased chances for guest posting and link-building.
Less directly, you could also do this by posting things like polls and responding to comments to both drive up your engagement as well as build rapport with your audience and online community. You could even take this a step further by joining in online groups or starting up a Slack channel / broadcast channel on Instagram.
8. Optimising Content Creators Profiles
Google systems do look at the credibility of the source of the content or where it came from and when tied to high followed and highly engaged social media profiles the content may be more trusted in Google’s view. It helps therefore, to include this in your article boiler plates or author pages on your site, if these profiles are highly engaged.
9. Monitor for social mentions
It makes sense to monitor for social mentions if the entire strategy behind social media SEO is to syndicate content in order to support he SEO strategy.
One way to do this is use Google Alerts to alert you of any mentions of the brand in question in order to utilise those opportunities for linking earning opportunities.
Implementing a good social listening system can help you with this greatly – know exactly what the general consensus from customers is, what they really think about you, and what your competition is doing next. All of this will help you plan your content better and the result will be more tailored to your real audience.
With that being said, if you find some content in particular is performing well, do not be afraid to repurpose and recycle it to extend the content’s lifespan. You put in a lot of hard work to create it, you might as well utilise it to its full potential!
10. Influencer collaborations
These days, influencers definitely play a part in shaping the market, so it’s an important facet we can’t leave out.
You can make use of influencer marketing in a variety of ways:
– Paying them to feature your brand on their platform that has a large reach
– Having them participate in your advertisements
– Sending them free products in exchange for reviews/content
– Collaborate on a special limited edition product release
– Collaborate on giveaways
– Extend invites to any events you facilitate
– Consider establishing an ambassador programme
Influencer marketing can seem daunting, but once you find the right fit for your brand and your audience, they can be a fun and powerful way to drive meaningful engagement, and ultimately sales.
Whether this is your first time attempting to integrate social media with SEO, or not, this SEO Services Guide hopes to provide you with the guidance you need in merging the two.
Remember that social media is a slow burn and often a game of patience and persistence. Algorithms of various social media platforms are constantly shifting and evolving, meaning that unfortunately, what worked today may not work tomorrow.
But remain persistent and consistent in the quality of content you produce and reap the rewards of a dedicated and loyal consumer-base. At the end of the day, merging the benefits of social media and the insights from this SEO Services Guide into your SEO strategy makes your brand a powerful force to be reckoned with.