Social media marketing may not directly impact your SEO ranking, but it will help increase your brand exposure. And more often than not, the best ranking pages on search engines are those with more social shares.
The same applies when you use specific SEO techniques for your social media marketing efforts. They increase your brand awareness using social channels, thus bringing more traffic to your website. Read on for details about what SEO techniques to use in social marketing to boost your website’s overall ranking and gain more traffic.
Google scraping and keywords
The SEO techniques you apply to your social marketing are similar to those you use for your website. Google scraping is one since social media still heavily relies on keywords.
Scraping means getting those keywords that are most relevant for your business.
Social media search engines boost posts based on how quickly they become popular, but they need the help of keywords to find your posts in the first place.
To decide what keywords you wish to rank for and use for social media:
Understand your competition better. You can do that by researching top articles that rank for a specific keyword to determine whether you can outrank them.
Use the Google scraping tool to extract search results based on keywords of your choice. The more keywords you use, the more specific articles and tailored data you will be given. Such data may reveal how your competitors advertise their products, what products they promote, and how their customers are engaging in return.
Pick the most suitable keywords for your needs.
Add those keywords to both your social media and website page, product description, title and meta tags, meta description, articles’ body, and copy of your social media posts.
Frequent and high-quality content
The more often you post fresh and unique content on your website, the more you boost the SEO. The same applies to your social media marketing. Why? Because quality content that often appears before the eyes of your target audience makes them more engaged. On the other hand, that leads to more website traffic, social shares, overall exposure, and eventually - more sales.
Suppose you post on social media rarely or your content is poor. In that case, your target audience won’t notice you, whereas your current clients may start following other competitors searching for higher value.
There is a thin line between posting frequently on social media and over-posting. Some studies suggest that you may notice a drop in your engagement rate if you start posting too often. Experts say it’s best to post once a day at the most.
Call-to-actions (CTAs)
Call-to-actions are an SEO technique that primarily affects your audience’s engagement, lead generation efforts, and overall user experience. You must use proper CTAs both on your website and within your social media posts in the form of buttons and links to tell users what to do next. Without them, users are likely to struggle to find things they need.
Additionally, your website’s bounce rate may increase without a clear CTA, which is a significant SEO factor. More importantly, however, customers want them. Many expect a CTA button at the end of your post, ad copy or article and want to learn what to do next.
CTAs for social media vary depending on the type and the purpose of your content. Some of the most popular ones are:
“Read more” – if you want them to read the entire article piece, learn more about your products, services, promotional deals and more
“Download” – if you want them to download an ebook, whitepaper, case study you are proud of, a brochure, or a menu
“Watch full video” – if you want them to go to your YouTube channel or website and see the full version of your video
“Let’s talk”, “Contact us”, “Get a free quote” - these are all CTAs for lead generation, and usually, you use them to take your audience to a contact page where they need to fill out their contact details.
Visuals
The use of visuals, including videos, gifs, memes, images, photos and graphics on your website and social media, significantly impact your engagement rate. They draw attention and cause your audience to react much more than posting plain text. As mentioned earlier, the more your audience is engaged, the easier it is to convert it to customers and retain it.
Visuals also help:
Boost your click-through-rate (CTA) and convert
Grow your organic traffic
Increase social media shares
Make sure you use visuals wisely -- make them relevant to the rest of your content and to the landing pages you are using, or else your bounce rate will go up.
To sum up
The SEO techniques you use for your website and social media marketing are almost identical. The most important one is using high-quality content in all its forms. Google and the social media channels always prioritize quality over quantity. Also, before you start posting anything on your social media channels, do thorough research on competitors, and create a strategy based on the obtained data. This way your efforts will all be coordinated and focused in one direction.
About the author
Nick Chernets is the Founder and CEO of DataForSEO, the leading provider of marketing data. Just as much as he is passionate about data analysis and SEO — Nick also enjoys sharing his experience from the business side of the industry.
