Social media is playing an ever-more important role in SEO. Many small businesses think of social media and SEO as two different things, but the reality is that we can’t afford to operate as though social media is separate anymore.
SEO vs. Social Media
Traditional SEO focuses on content, linking and the architecture of the website. This is still the key focus for SEO, but social media adds some new components to the equation: identity and relationships. It’s important to view these two spheres as two parts of a bigger picture, and implement cross-functional plans to boost performance in both spheres.
Scale Your Social Media Efforts
The more people you can reach with your social media, the more impact it will have on your SEO efforts. If you’ve got a small social impact, you won’t see much benefit to your SEO. If you manage to scale your social media up to reach more people, it will have a positive impact on your SEO.
Implement defined social media guidelines for social engagement. Empower your employees to use social media in an effort to scale your social impact. Social media doesn’t have to be restricted to one area of the business, either; the value of social media can be extended into R&D, sales, support and marketing.
Use Data to Drive Your Alignment of Social and SEO
Align your key performance indicators to maximize the partnership between social and SEO. Ask yourself a few important questions to create a plan that incorporates both of these vital strategies:
- How can we incorporate social media into our sales and conversion process? What are our social media goals for sales and conversion?
- How does social sentiment data impact our SEO strategy?
- How can we use SEO keyword data to craft a more effective social outreach strategy?
A good social media strategy can have a larger indirect impact on search marketing efforts. When you combine the power of your social media campaign with your SEO strategy, the results can propel your reach far beyond either strategy alone.
Create Harmony Between SEO and Social
Optimizing for SEO or social can help boost your site’s performance, and ultimately, improve your revenue. But creating harmony between your SEO and social campaigns can catapult your optimization efforts and compound your results exponentially. When SEO and social are working together, you can see a massive return that goes beyond the optimization of either side alone. So how do you get your SEO and social working together to boost your bottom line?
Leverage Promoted Posts
Link-building is generally a slow and steady slog, but you can do something to dramatically boost your link-building success: tying in some strategic paid promotions.
The goal of your SEO team is to acquire high-quality links. The social media team, though, is trying to engage the community and attract new audience members. These goals don’t seem to overlap, but there are steps you can take that ultimately improve both.
Paid organic SEO is the key to uniting your social and SEO teams to dramatically boost your link-building efforts. When you create exceptional content and choose the right audience to target, you can spend as little as $25 per day on paid organic SEO and see dramatic returns. Plus these audiences are more likely to convert at a higher rate, which can help you reach your short-term goals.
Create Better Content
Don’t just rely on tired old content that’s no different from everything else out there in your chosen niche. Brainstorm to create better content that appeals to your target audiences – because content that your target audience really enjoys is more likely to get shares and social engagement. And that gets you a bigger audience, which in turn gives you more opportunity for conversion.
Engage the Movers and Shakers
Influencers in your niche have the ability to bring a dramatic spike in traffic and interest to your site. Encourage your social media team to build relationships with influencers in your field, because this can have massive benefits for your link-building campaign. Be careful when engaging with influencers, though; these people likely get a lot of outreach, so it’s important to carefully build a real relationship instead of just blindly spamming your influencer and hoping for positive results.
Unite your SEO and social efforts, and watch your short-term and long-term goals soar!