Harnessing the Power of Social Media for SEO

Two of the most significant marketing tactics around are social media marketing and search engine optimization (SEO).

63% of marketers who responded to a recent Statista survey strongly agreed that social media was critical to their business. Semrush’s State of Content Marketing: 2023 Global Report revealed that 46% of respondents said that performing SEO led to their content marketing success.

Social media marketing and SEO generate noteworthy results individually when done right, making them both an integral part of many marketers’ overarching strategies.

But have you considered how one can support the other? It isn’t discussed as often as it should be, but social media can enhance your SEO efforts.

Where Social Media and SEO Intersect

Social media content and engagement aren’t something search engines factor in for rankings. However, social media can positively impact SEO in indirect ways — such as by allowing you to get more engagement, promote your content, build relationships, and improve brand awareness. Essentially, social media can be a way of driving traffic to your SEO-optimized content, allowing it to rank higher in search results. Let’s examine the ways that social media can help you rank higher on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Get More Engagement

Social media platforms are always active. People are on these platforms to engage with family and friends, absorb and share content, interact with businesses and brands, and stay up to date on what’s most important to them.

Because of this constant activity, these platforms are perfect for engaging with your target audience and vice versa. If you’re taking full advantage of social media, you should be directing traffic to the rest of your online presence, such as your website.

As you generate more engagement on social media, many of your followers will click the links you include in your content. Search engines will see this traffic to your site and the length of time visitors stay on it as a sign that your website and content are reputable, thus helping your search engine rankings.

Promote Your Content

Social media is one of the best channels for content promotion. Not only is it free to use, but it provides access to a global audience. Make an effort to stay current and relevant to that audience, and you’re well on your way to getting lots of eyes on your content.

Search engines hyper-focus on content quality and relevancy when compiling search engine results. They also tend to rank content with a lot of traffic and engagement higher in the SERPs.

If you can create high-quality content that’s relevant to your target audience and their search queries, promote it on social media, and get people to view and interact with it, your SEO results are likely to improve.

Build Relationships With Influencers and Bloggers

There are millions of influencers on social media right now. In fact, a survey conducted in 2021 indicated that 43% of people followed some kind of social media influencer. And let’s not forget about the millions of active bloggers as well; they also use social media and have followers that enjoy reading and engaging with their content.

Social media is one of the best places to build relationships with influencers and bloggers. You can leverage their connection with their followers by asking them to promote your brand and content to their audience.

They can direct their followers to specific links and content that you’re hoping to drive traffic to. Getting this influx of organic traffic from the promotional efforts of reputable influencers will send a positive sign to search engines about your brand’s reputation and the quality of your content.

The key is choosing the right influencers and bloggers with target audiences similar to yours.

Improve Brand Awareness

Search engines look at the trustworthiness of your site and the reputation of your brand when determining rankings. It’s essential to build both if you want the best chance at your content ranking high.

Social media platforms present a unique opportunity to build brand awareness. When you engage with your target audience regularly and build authentic relationships with the individuals in it, they’ll eventually become familiar with your brand.

In becoming familiar with your brand, people will want to learn more about it. They’ll eventually end up on your website. And if they like the experience they’re having, they’ll come back and continue engaging with the content you publish on it and social media.

Increasing brand awareness in this way will have a positive influence on content engagement, which indirectly helps your SEO efforts.

Tips for Using Social Media to Boost Your SEO Efforts

Although not a ranking factor, social media has great potential to enhance your SEO strategy and results. If you’re ready to use social media to boost your SEO efforts, implement the following tips.

Revisit your Target Audience

Having a healthy following on your social media platforms is important for generating results for both your social media marketing strategy and your SEO efforts. But it isn’t so much about having the most followers as it is about having an audience that engages with you and your content regularly.

Revisiting your target audience to ensure you’re attracting the right people on your platforms is a must first step. If you aren’t targeting the right people, your engagement will decline. And without engagement, you can’t get people to the content that’s a part of your SEO strategy.

Make sure you’ve clearly defined your target audience, covering demographic, psychographic, and behavioral information. You should also post consistently on the platforms your ideal audience frequents and be sure to create content that they engage with the most.

Identify Where You Want To Drive Traffic To

Once you know who you’re trying to connect with on social media and how to best do so, move on to figuring out what you’re driving traffic to. At the core of SEO is driving traffic to your website and different content with the hope of ranking high in SERPs.

Focus on specific pieces of content from your blog or website. Select pages that are important to your ongoing SEO strategy or that support other marketing initiatives and business goals. You’ll promote links to this content in your social media posts to generate organic traffic to it.

You’ll also want to consider keywords and topics to cover in your content. Which are most relevant to your target audience and what kind of content have you already produced to cover them?

If you already have live SEO content, you can look at specific metrics to help you determine which pieces are worth driving traffic to. For instance, you could look at organic traffic conversions and bounce rate to see what content is converting people into customers and whether people are staying on certain pages. This will help you determine which pages are most likely to benefit from additional promotion.

Create Share-Worthy Social Media Content

Everyone says to create unique content that people will want to share and engage with. But how exactly do you do this? What makes a piece of content unique enough to share and valuable enough to engage with?

First, think about how you can go against the grain with all of your content. Don’t try to fit in. Instead, lean on what will set you apart, whether that be your brand’s personality, an unconventional perspective, the value you create, or the visuals that accompany your message.

Second, experiment with content types. Ditch solely static images and try short and long-form video content, infographics, animated content, polls, surveys, and live streams. You want to grab your audience’s attention with exciting and interactive content and engage them all the way to the call-to-action where you’ve incorporated the links we mentioned above.

Think about what makes you want to engage with content and share it, and incorporate some of what you discover into your content.

Conclusion

The reach and engagement of social media can be incredibly helpful in your SEO efforts. You can boost engagement, promote your content, build relationships, and better brand awareness to maximize your online visibility and drive organic traffic to your website and content. Implement the tips above to use social media to boost your SEO results.

By Indiana Lee, BOSS contributor