Learn How Social Media Strategies Boost SEO Performance
Social media has become one of the main ways businesses, operating at every level, can reach their target market. But most don’t understand the full reach of social media. In fact, a sharp social media strategy will make an impact far outside of just what your followers see.
While the success of your social media campaign might not be a direct SEO ranking factor, a flourishing social media can benefit your business in a myriad ways.
From increasing your web traffic to helping your business dominate the search engine results page (SERP), investing in a high-end social media strategy can deliver incredible growth. Here, we explore this impact and what techniques your business can adopt to enhance its performance.
How Does Social Media Impact SEO Practices?
Just because social media posts don’t count as a ranking factor like page speed or backlinks doesn’t mean your efforts aren’t enhancing your reach on Google. Consider these advantages and decide whether it’s time to take your social media posting to greater heights.
Increases Web Traffic
The core benefit of innovative SEO practices is how they increase your brand’s visibility on search engines like Google and Bing. But a razor-sharp approach to social media can similarly benefit your business.
By taking the time to produce high-quality, keyword-driven content that educates and entertains your audience, website visitors are bound to share this content with their friends, family and colleagues on social media. Naturally, this increased attention on your brand will help boost your overall web traffic and keep your conversions ticking over.
Alongside a comprehensive social media content calendar, your company can keep more eyeballs on your social media profiles and website for longer.
Dominate the SERP
The ultimate goal for a search engine optimisation campaign is to reach the number one spot in relevant Google search results. If you manage to achieve this goal, you can expect massive amounts of organic traffic to visit your homepage.
Optimised social media profiles can also help you rank. Your business can appear at the top of the search results, because these pages also rank in the SERP when someone types a branded search. For example, your Facebook, Instagram and TikTok profiles will appear alongside your official website.
As potential customers look over the results, they are encouraged to get to know your business from various perspectives. By exploring your social media presence, they’ll discover your personalised posts that highlight your brand’s authority and showcase its personality.
Reach More Engaged Consumers
The amount of website traffic businesses can receive from a carefully conceived social media marketing campaign is truly staggering.
With a strong tone that resonates with your customer base and outstanding content that satisfies their needs, you can generate awesome engagement that sees your content spread far and wide.
So how does this help your business in terms of SEO practices? The equation is pretty straightforward – attracting highly engaged website traffic via social media directly impacts your search rankings.
By ensuring your brand stands out against its rivals on social media, you can make sure potential customers click, read and share your posts, which ultimately helps you climb the SERP.
Boost Local SEO Practices
If your company’s success relies on converting local customers, your search engine optimisation techniques must strategically reach this audience. By creating content that captures their attention, you can drive more consumers to your e-commerce and brick-and-mortar stores.
However, social media marketing can also have a powerful role in this relationship. By getting more people talking about your business on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, your business will grow in prominence amongst a similar target market that could benefit from your products and services.
In addition, NAP data is a significant factor in local SEO practices. By having active social media profiles that ensure this critical business information remains accurate wherever it appears online, you can boost your reach in relevant Google searches.
How Leading Social Sites Benefit SEO
Social media is now just a part of daily life for billions of people around the world. With brands having no shortage of choice when reaching their target market, understanding how the best social media apps benefit your SEO practices is critical to your long-term strategy.
Ready to have your mind blown? Facebook has an eye-watering 2.9 billion monthly active users in 2021.
As you might expect, this unbelievably large user base means virtually every kind of business – no matter how niche – can reach a target market that cares about its products and services.
With Facebook making it remarkably easy for brands to share content with users in numerous fascinating formats, the platform continues to deliver first-rate engagement across likes, comments and shares.
Google also crawls and indexes Facebook posts, meaning keyword-driven posts will appear in the SERP for people conducting relevant searches.
Twitter has been around for a long time, but it still serves as one of the most important social media platforms. Like Facebook, Twitter also has a range of media formats that make sharing content an awesome experience for both brands and followers.
Across text posts, images, videos, polls and more, driving more customers to your brand is made possible. By growing your following on the platform and producing content that gets them to engage, you can rapidly expand your audience and find more people who love your products and services.
Alongside an optimised bio with clear contact information, implementing top-notch social media tips for Twitter will help your business outgrow the competition.
TikTok
With TikTok passing the enormous milestone of one billion monthly active users in 2021, the short-form video platform hardly needs any introduction. But if you haven’t kept up with the changing social media landscape, advertising on TikTok has become insanely profitable.
So how can TikTok boost your search engine optimisation performance? By targeting your audience on the platform with a tailored social media marketing campaign, you can drive more brand awareness and website traffic.
As your business grows in prominence amongst its audience, you’ll push up the SERP to the first page. Plus, Google is reportedly working on plans to index TikTok videos, meaning the best time to get started on your campaign is now.
Instagram is the perfect social media platform to establish your brand’s personality and engage with your audience. As consumer behaviour has undergone widespread shifts in recent years, customers want to know more about the companies they purchase from.
So, where do people visit to learn more about your business? In many cases, their first port of call is Instagram. With 81% of people saying they use Instagram to research a brand’s products and services, your company’s profile must be fully optimised for your goals.
By crafting engaging content, posting regularly and using carefully selected hashtags, you can get your target audience on Instagram to pay close attention to your business.
Pinterest might look similar to image-sharing platforms like Instagram on the surface, but it’s actually rather different once you start digging into its features.
Although there are ordinary social media features on Pinterest like comments and sharing, the platform also operates as a powerful search engine for images.
With more than two billion searches conducted on the platform every month, people love to use Pinterest when searching for visual inspiration for a DIY project or a product they want to buy.
Images on Pinterest are also crawled and indexed by Google. By using this to your advantage as part of broader SEO practices, you can dominate SERPs related to your business.
YouTube
As customers around the globe gain access to fast internet and smartphones, video marketing is now the preferred advertising method. In fact, 90% of customers want brands to produce more video content.
Why? Because the attention span of customers is growing shorter. Rather than reading an entire article to get the message, watching a short video on a smartphone is even more convenient.
YouTube is the dominant video-sharing website with around one billion hours of content consumed every day. By creating top-notch content on YouTube, these videos will rank highly on the SERP and increase your brand awareness.
Launch into YouTube for SEO and find out why many of the world’s leading brands are turning their attention to producing high-quality content on YouTube.
Tips for Improving SEO through Social Media
We’ve covered how social media can benefit your business, but what techniques do you need to apply to make it happen? If you’re ready to increase your SEO performance with clever social media strategies, check out these tips to reach more consumers and climb the SERP.
Produce High-Quality Content
Social media marketing can only be effective if the content you share applies to your target market.
While you want to showcase your brand’s personality, there’s no point in posting memes if your followers prefer to read educational blogs about how your product benefits them.
By conducting comprehensive research on your customer base and understanding what content resonates with them, you can develop a content plan that keeps them thoroughly engaged.
As you craft high-quality blogs, YouTube videos and infographics, these can easily be shared with your social media followers.
Ideally, other brands reference these in their own content, generating powerful backlinks that enhance your company’s search engine optimisation.
Drive Cross-Promotion
To become the leading business in your industry, potential customers have to encounter your brand on every platform.
With research finding that the average sale requires more than eight touchpoints with an individual customer, using social media to cross-promote your content is highly effective.
Not only do you increase the lifespan of blogs that take significant work to craft when you post them on Facebook or Twitter, but you also drive more customers to visit your website.
In addition, you can make your followers aware that you’re active on other platforms, helping to increase your follower count and spread brand awareness amongst a new customer base.
If you’ve just got started on TikTok, encourage your Instagram followers to check out your profile.
Make Content Shareable
To maximise your SEO gains through social media, you need to make content super easy for website visitors to share.
If someone is reading your blog and wants to promote a fascinating point you make, quickly accessible social share buttons ensure they can post to their Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn without any hassle.
But shareable content goes beyond these features. For example, adding a strong call-to-action at the end of your blog or video ensures your most loyal fans help spread your message.
Plus, valuable content designed to increase engagement like checklists, questions and contests help to drive likes, comments, shares and website visits.
Create a Consistent Social Media Presence
If your brand wants to experience incredible success from its social media presence, generating an omnichannel mindset is vital to achieving your objectives. What does that mean? You have to get each channel moving in the same direction.
Across the visuals you use and the messages you communicate, customers need to easily find and engage with your business online. If each profile has a different name and tone, you might find your target market gets confused about who they are interacting with.
With seamless consistency across your channels, you can align your brand’s messages, drive more engagement and increase your reach on the search engine results page.
Focus on Brand-Customer Relationships
When customers trust that your brand is interested in delivering the best possible service rather than simply taking their money, they are obviously far more likely to return in the future.
But how do you establish this credibility in the first place? You need to plan and implement a social media marketing strategy that grows the brand-customer relationship. By understanding your customers’ pain points and taking genuine steps to resolve them, this mutually beneficial relationship will thrive.
Alongside transparent messaging, light-hearted interactions on social media and top-notch customer service, this customer relationship increases your brand’s reputation and benefits your SEO practices.
Chat to the Experts
So, how can social media benefit your business in terms of SEO? The answer is significantly increased reach and brand awareness directly translates to more website traffic and better rankings.
If you’re ready to use social media to level up your brand’s performance, you won’t find a better agency to lead your campaign than First Page Australia. Our digital marketing experts have helped thousands of businesses achieve their targets for an outstanding ROI.
To find out more, start a conversation with our talented team about how social media marketing will benefit your business in endless ways.
