Are you searching for how to use social media to improve SEO and Google search engine rankings? Do you wish to enhance your SEO campaign using social media? If yes, we will address all the questions with practical tips here.
Improving an SEO strategy is important as it increases Google rankings and searches visibility. But the intense competition makes the appearance in search results a little challenging, as a lot of content gets published regularly. With a huge volume of content available on the internet, your chances to pop in the search engine get reduced. But you can increase the chances by using the ideal content strategy.
This guide will cover the essential tips that help you know how to use social media to improve SEO. But first, let’s discuss the impact of social media on SEO.
How does social media impact SEO?
Well, it is true that social media don’t impact SEO directly, and social signals like gaining followers, retweeting, and likes don’t affect rankings. But these signals can be manipulated, allowing even the less valuable site to attain a higher rank. In addition, the quick creation of posts and profile updates are too quick to keep up with them. So, what is the role of social media in SEO?
Although social media can’t impact the SEO rankings directly, it can influence factors that may improve your rankings as it is capable of bringing traffic to your website. If you share links on your social media profiles, it brings more traffic to your pages. Furthermore, social media helps create valuable content and is an effective way to improve SEO rankings.
When creating content, you offer your followers useful information through videos, ebooks, blogs, and infographics. Content marketing includes sharing the essential knowledge with the people they are looking for.
Once the audience finds your content, they spare time to read it. The more time your audience stays at your page informs Google about your page value, and it will rank your page well to help more audience find this valuable information.
There are chances that people organically discover your content, but you can use social media to help more people find your content. Social media lets you share helpful content with your audience. If your followers get interested in your business, they will automatically engage with your content.
Moreover, your audience can further share your content with other people, which gives a chance for a new audience to review your content. It creates brand exposure and brings more traffic to your page. An increase in traffic means more people are visiting your site and reading your content, which will enhance your SEO rankings.
Now that you know the impact of social media on SEO, let’s move to the tips. Some of the important ones are listed below:
KEEP YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA HANDLES UP-TO-DATE.
Did you ever witness that social media profile shows in the search results, especially while looking for the most prominent brands? Not to mention, nowadays, social media itself serves as a search engine. Many people search for social media pages while looking for a brand and its services. Social media pages are more intractable than web pages and can provide genuine company insights and personality.
Simultaneously, if you don’t retain your social media pages relevant and up-to-date, it is a big red flag for the users. Furthermore, checking for any spammy or duplicate pages on social media platforms is necessary. It will ensure the convenience for the users to recognize your official company page on the social media platform.
By keeping all the social media pages brand-focused and up-to-date, you can create a more personal, fun, and engaging experience for your followers or anyone who discovers your brand page through Google. A more positive experience results in more engagement, which is a favorable ranking sign to search engines.
ENGAGE WITH YOUR AUDIENCE
Your social media profile is among the few ways to link directly with your followers. So, it is important to constantly engage with your audience to make a strong and good reputation for your business. Engaging with your audience will build a more personal connection as they feel more connected with your business.
If your business has a positive reputation among your followers, there is a chance that your audience is spreading positive words about your business to others. As a result, they will be more interested in sharing your content.
ENHANCE ENGAGEMENT FROM YOUR AUDIENCE
Although Google doesn’t consider social media behavior for SEO, you can enhance engagement on your social media pages to attract more people to interact with the content. Always focus on engaging your followers while posting content on social media websites. Engagement involves likes, favorites, shares, replies, and retweets. All these indicate that your followers view your content and engage with it.
So, now the question arises, how to make content that enhances engagement?
Mainly the business takes the help of incentives to make people interact with the content. They reward their audience for tagging a friend in their posts or sharing a post. It is an ideal way to get a new following for your social media account or page.
Furthermore, you can make interactive and creative posts to increase engagement. You may also ask your followers to tag your friend. This way, you can boost engagement on your posts.
CREATE BRAND AWARENESS
Building Brand awareness is important to earn conversions. When the audience knows about your brand, they will likely select your business over the others. And social media platform is a great place to create brand recognition. Always put your brand in front of the audience while posting something on social media. It would be beneficial to post frequently so that your followers can consistently interact with your brand. Try to keep the posts consistent by following your brand’s unique style.
With brand exposure to your followers, they start more frequent brand searches. For example, rather than searching for air fresheners, they might search for Glade air fresheners as they were engaged with your brand’s post on social media.
But how does it affect SEO?
When the audience performs brand searches, it helps your website rank well for non-brand keywords. In the above case, the brand name will rank better for the keyword as people are also searching their brand name with that keywords. So, by creating your brand via social media platforms, the business’s visibility on the search engines gets increased.
MODIFY THE IMAGES FOR SEO
It is a well-known fact that the images are helpful in adding context and enhancing engagement for any social media post or blog. What people might not know is how you insert and set up images in your content can negatively or positively affect your SEO ranking. There are numerous ranking indications that SEO algorithm considers while evaluating the images on web pages.
Here are some practices you can follow while optimizing images for your content:
USE ALT TAGS
You might be wondering about the alt tags. Basically, it is a part of HTML code that is applied to the images that help bots and search engines analyze the image. These tags provide another positive data point that helps to boost SEO ranking.
OPTIMIZE THE NAMES OF IMAGE FILES
A quick two or three-word name might be sufficient for you to remember the picture. But SEO algorithms read and rank the file names more deeply. Make sure to name the images with descriptive, relevant, and hyphenated keywords.
USE UNIQUE IMAGES
Stock photography can seem like an effortless and quick way to add some flare to your social media or blog content without the burden of opting for custom photography. However, what you get easily can make your site sacrifice in SEO ranking. Mostly the stock photos are used by multiple sites, making it hard for your site to stand out from an SEO point of view. So, it is always recommended to upload unique images if possible.
USE HASHTAGS
Hashtags are among the essential elements in the world of social media. They help to attract an interested audience to your social media page. By adding hashtags to your posts, you will get the leads that have an interest in your content. The count of hashtags you can use is based on the platform you use. If you are using Twitter for your content, you can post just a few hashtags due to the character limit.
Hashtags works like keywords in the social media world. When the audience searches for information on a particular topic, they will research for the hashtags to find the relevant post related to the topic. With the integration of hashtags, you will be able to attract more interested leads that check your site and reads your content. If someone searches for a specific topic, the hashtag usage may trigger your content to display in the search results.
MAKE RELATIONSHIPS VIA ACTIVE CONVERSATIONS.
The best way to boost engagement on your social media account is to create relationships. The relationships help to understand the potential buyers, the problems they are struggling to sort, and their needs. So, when they get a vibe that you understand their problems and are willing to solve their problems, it becomes easy for them to connect with you and the best place for such engagement is social media.
You can converse with them through marketing profiles, social groups, and forums. Take the initiative and start a conversation with your followers without wasting time. Here’s how you can start:
- Respond to the comments of the users.
- Ask some relevant questions to know about their thinking for your brand
- Search for the question they might have asked and give helpful answers.
- Ask their thinking concerning your latest blog post.
- Create a poll to know what they expect to read in the future on your blogs.
These are some ways to initiate conversations that create long-term relationships and create positive results. It is crucial for enhancing your SEO as you provide helpful information while establishing your expertise in the industry. As a result, you get an enhancement in the engagement and the followers that boosts the social media signals considered by Google to rank your website.
BY MEASURING AND OPTIMIZING
Adjusting and monitoring your strategies is important to get the maximum benefit of your social media campaigns. You can use various metrics to measure the impact of social media on search engine visibility. The first metrics to monitor engagement include shares, comments, and brand mentions. The highest the numbers, the more authority, and relevance. The increase in credibility creates a positive impact on the search rankings.
Another set of metrics you must consider is social media’s impact on your site. It includes visibility levels in the rankings, site traffic linked with it, and conversion rates. It is worth conducting an overall analysis to check the sales, ranking, and traffic.
To learn which social media efforts are working to improve SEO, you must be capable of measuring these metrics. You can use the tools like Pro Rank Tracker to measure the metrics. The tools make it easy to understand reports on SEO ranks from which you can get actionable insights.
PAY ATTENTION TO THE INFLUENCERS
You might be aware that influencers are ruling social media these days. You also need to review the influencer stats to notice how much. There is no need to aim high for influencer marketing strategy. But, if you have links with the influencers in your area or sector to whom the audience listens, it may be worth considering using them for your social media platform. It will probably boost your site visits that automatically enhance the SEO.