Social SEO Defined
Social Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to the direct linking up google to drive traffic to social media or the reverse to drive traffic from social media to your website.
Whatever your end goal is, creating an audience is the greatest way to utilize Social SEO.
Exploring Social SEO
Lets explore how we can use social media activities and interactions to boost organic traffic through search engines to our website.
Firstly, by registering on the different social media platforms, you will gain back linking from all of those websites, as well as slight domain authority increases from registration. What this means is our website gets a slightly greater leverage in google search results from linking to these larger websites who hold great authority on the web. This will give you a slight boost in search results ranking across the board. It is very similar to a point system and google’s algorithm will tally up all the points you’ve accumulated over the lifetime of your website, and will give you a score.
We can then take it one step further by getting verified by each of the platforms. In fact, most of the platforms are owned and subsidiaries of Google. By becoming verified on these different platforms you can ultimately end up getting your business verified on Google. This is a huge boost as you will now have your own panel on google when users search for your website.
Getting Google Verified
Getting verified on Google you can provide specific information about yourself or your business, where consumers don’t have to directly access your website to get information. It’s a quick way for people to go ahead and look at your services, contact you, and find relevant information quickly. That’s the whole goal of this is, to provide high-quality relevant information as quick as possible.
The simplest way to get verified on google is to link your website to google search console and then go to google my business to register your company for a knowledge panel. You can also use social media accounts like YouTube, twitter, and others if you are a verified user.
How To Tailor Content For Social Media Marketing
The issue with SEO from social media is that not only are we now dealing with an algorithm from Google and other search engines, but now we’re tying this with algorithms directly on the social media platforms. For instance, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter all use different proprietary algorithms. Some social medias use hashtags, some have groups, and so what happens is we start getting differences in the content that we create. Pretty soon it’ll start getting pretty messy very quickly. Next thing you know were having to tailoring our generic content to better fit these social media algorithms to generate stronger Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on their specific platform.
In order to tailor content for multiple social media markets I recommend using a specific service that can accomplish this for you, as well as post on the various specific time frames that users are access this social media app. Examples of different services are Hoot Suite. We even have to be concerned about the image sizes and formats when we post as they are all different as well. The time ranges are different as well and its important to familiarize yourself with this information.
When Posting ask yourself these few questions:
- Who is your audience?
- What does a popular post on this platform look like?
- What content does my audience on this platform specifically enjoy?
- What content can I share that will fit into their feed?
Keeping Up With Social Media
Consistency is key in a place where content is constantly appearing and attempting to grab your audiences attention and divert their way. Well with a strategic plan you too can start bringing a greater audience. Regular dates and uploads is a main factor. Chaos is not appreciated in world and your customer will be happy to see content at the same times and the same places. We as humans enjoy consistency, lets keep our marketing strategy that way.
You really have to be on top of your social media game in order to succeed you cannot neglect social media. We spoke a little bit about the difference systems in place for social medias like grouping and hashtags, utilizing these systems is how you succeed, but also creating high quality content on those platforms systems is how you beat it. Be sure to use the most relevant hashtags and join the groups that are associated with what you are posting. To social media algorithms they will associate this with high quality content and drive traffic to you without you having to put in a huge amount of effort. This is Search Engine Optomization (SEO). Simply learn to leverage these different systems for the greatest impact on your audience, and never stop doing marketing research.
Benefits of Social SEO
Social SEO allows us to expand beyond the normal SEO boundaries of search engines and start reaching audiences through social interactions and search engines specific to social platforms. This is a sort of micro SEO in which we are utilizing the best of both worlds! Micro communities have the greatest returns when it comes to marketing influence. My reccomendation is see what your competitors are doing, start following their followers. At the end of the day you are looking to penetrate social circles similar to yours and grow your own circle and audience.
Learn from the big guys, just go check out Nike’s Instagram and you’ll find creative posts that edge on the line of advertising but still provide value to its users. Any company can accomplish this from small to large. Over time your posts will continue to bring in traffic and associate words to your brand, creating greater influence in multiple online search engines and directories. It is okay to start slow but continue to produce content like no other.
Social media has the greatest influence by connecting directly to its customers and starting to build an audience based off of their directories.
Social media is a great place to test new markets and introduce new marketing campaigns because you can get direct results immediately and direct feedback.
Social media is great in the fact that, it allows customers to voice their concerns and companies to directly reply to these concerns publicly, which means more users will see their response and learn from it, agree, or create a discussion further extending your impact.
There are new social media platforms being introduced every year! Some are huge hits and some are dead beats, as a business owner it is your decision to make if you want to create an audience on the different platforms. But it will never hurt you, even bad content is content and as the saying goes in marketing, negative publicity is publicity my competitor wishes they had.
Social Media Platforms work with search engines to advertise content! The second largest search engine in the world, second only to google is YouTube, a social media platform that utilizes video content to share information.
Video Content & SEO
YouTube is kind of seen as the golden child of Google, and they share very similar algorithms and so when producing content on both platforms you can interchange these dimensions. There is not much tailoring involved in the content, but Youtube has its own direct page on google search results in the video tab. This is a specific type of SEO that again is analyzed differently and produced differently, but the content is the same. These videos are now even getting a banner directly at the top of search results!
Specifically we have seen a growing trend with video content creation. For example most notably we saw the creation of TikTok and it’s large growing consumer base. Many Social medias begin in this growing phase and its up to corporations to decide if this is something they want to engage in and support. We have seen many rise up and become huge like Snapchat and Instagram, and some never reach their peak promise like vine and google+.
We recommend exploring all of the social medias and not limiting your self or your company to a few in particular but rather really try to connect with multiple groups, in multiple parties through what is available on all the platforms that are available
Just remember that social media is about sharing and sharing is building social SEO.
Most noticeably the latest trend in social media is the development of in-page web pages for users. These are pages that the social media company creates on your behalf to promote a service or an event, Facebook is the leader in this, but we also see Snapchat and others offering select pages for its business clients to sell products, services, or donations. By creating accounts on these websites you’re actually creating a mini web page that you can then link to your main web page and get increased traffic as a sub set of your main page without changing any content on your main page. This is huge!
Social SEO Summary
To summarize social media SEO is a great gainer for new companies as well as existing companies, however, they require robust campaigns, commitment to producing consistent content, and are very time driven. Regardless if you can meet these requirements or not we encourage you to begin posting and familiarizing yourself with how the different platforms operate and starting to conduct your own market research in your industry. Discover what works best for your specific industry and constantly seek to improve your posts.
To get a big boost in Search Engine Optomization (SEO), you’ll be either looking to purchase pay-per-click marketing for your advertisements or you’re looking to produce tons and tons of content, or a combination of both.
From our research and from what we’ve reviewed, major companies typically like Nike and Adidas post regularly about every four hours to only once a day. Once we get down to small business marketing you can be posting up to two every two hours, up to every single hour a day. At the end of the day quality and consistency is key, it’s really up to you to determine what content should be shared, what your audience is attracted to and finds relevant and go from there. Constantly conduct your own market research, try new things out.
We hope that you explore this great resource that is Social SEO and if you have any comments or questions please go ahead and leave them below! We’ll do our best to address any questions!
