The short answer to this question is yes. However, it doesn’t happen overnight and it takes a fair deal of effort on your part. But otherwise, having an active social media profile does give you a bit of an edge with your SEO efforts. In this article, we will take a closer look at the link between social media and SEO and cover some of the ways your social media activity can draw traffic to your blog or website.
Content Is King, But Who Sees It And How Do They See It?
You should already know that basic SEO practices revolve around regular, relevant content. This is why there are roughly five million blog posts published each day. Read that last line again. Five million blog posts daily. You have to wonder how many of them reach target audiences with so much volume to sift through. This is where social media comes into play.
Social media is considered one of the best digital platforms to expose your content and reach the audience you are targeting. When you consider that people spend most of their time online, it makes sense that if you want to get your message to your potential customers, you have to broadcast that message where your customers can be found.
The Benefits of Using Social Media To Share Content
There are several advantages to using social media to promote your content. They include:
Identifying Your Target Audience
When your content receives likes, shares, or any other reaction, it tells you that you are reaching your target audience. The insights that come from this will help you to determine who your audience is and what type of content draws the most reaction. Analytic tools are perfect for this task as they break down the traffic in many ways to assist you in making informed marketing decisions.
It Builds Trust And Authority
As the members of your target audience share your content, it reaches an even wider cross-section of potential customers. It also produces social signals. These are defined as the likes, shares, pins, and follower numbers that show your content is considered trustworthy. It also indicates your content means your business is an industry authority.
Increases Organic Traffic
One of the biggest pluses to sharing your content on social media is how it will send new visitors to your website. This increases the ranking Google gives your website making it appear more often in search results which brings you more business.
Search Engines Rank Social Media Profiles
This is where branding is so vital to linking your social media profile to your SEO efforts. When people search for a brand online, your social media profile will show up as one of the top search results. Because it does, you can use it in many different ways. Since not everyone will visit your website to find out more about who you are, your social media profile can do the talking for you. But that is only if you optimize it for branded searches. Here’s how you do that:
Keywords
All SEO efforts are built on the foundation of keywords. By establishing your branded keywords, your social media profile can slide up the Google page rankings and help you promote your brand to your targeted audience.
Hashtags
Another effective SEO tool is the hashtag. When you use branded hashtags in your posts, your content reaches more than just your followers. Hashtags can introduce your business to a whole new audience that was not aware of you before.
Local SEO
Although you are thinking globally, it is always important to keep local SEO in place. This can be something like local landing pages to geo-target content specific to a location if your business has multiple storefronts or different brands in various retail sites.
Identify As Your Company
One more highly effective branding SEO tactic is to switch out all of your social media feeds so that instead of them showing up with your personal name, have them identified by your company name. This will impact search results in a big way.
People Search For Things Online Differently
There was a time when search engines were the only logical place to search for information. However, with social media expanding to fill so much bandwidth on the internet, it has caused many to choose to search places like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and other feeds. With an active social media profile, your business does not get left behind and missed.
Where social media exceeds search engines is the speed at which visitors are attracted. SEO is still an important tool for your website, and it does pay dividends. But it takes a while. Social media posts that feature the right content and optimized social media profiles will draw traffic almost immediately. You can’t afford to ignore what that can do for your business.
How To Link Social Media To Your Website SEO
There are three main steps to achieving this goal. First, you must have a website. However, it can’t be just any website. It has to be professional-looking and contain good quality, relevant content. Next, gather together feedback from social media activity such as ratings and reviews and show them off on your website. This helps build authority and trust. Finally, optimize your social media profiles by publishing regular posts, and engaging with your audience. That can be encouraging them to add content, feedback, comments, reviews, etc.
Final Thoughts
Having an active social media profile not only helps with your website SEO efforts but can also work together with your SEO to increase the exposure of your business and brand. But you need to do a few things first to get traffic to your social media profiles. Because results are faster with social media, it is beneficial to incorporate these channels as part of your overall SEO marketing program. When done correctly, your target audience will be able to find you regardless of where they spend time online and you will be able to reach your audience with tools that are not your website but still need your website to solidify that relationship.
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Marina Turea works as a content manager at Digital Authority Partners, a Las Vegas marketing and SEO agency.