Optimizing your social media profiles can boost your business’s visibility, increase lead generation to your website and improve your rankings on search engines.
We’ve put together a step-by-step guide to optimize your social media profiles to boost your online visibility on your social media platforms and search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
The Best Social Media Platforms For SEO
It would be best if you took advantage of social media to ramping up the SEO of your website and overall online presence. You have to ensure your business utilizes the best social media sites to help your growth acceleration in 2021.
These THREE social sites not only get indexed and will appear in search results, but they will also help your website and blog posts rank higher as well.
Facebook’s platform is perfect for sharing all sorts of different content, whether it’s blog posts, product photos, videos, and more. In fact, your Facebook business page can almost be considered your home away from home or your second website.
Your business can share a lot of different information here – your hours, website, products, services, job listings, company info, and online store. So share your blog content, and landing pages fit right in with any other type of visual content you might put together. Google indexes links shared on Facebook, helping to boost your overall link building and SEO efforts.
The more times your content is shared on Facebook, the more traffic it generates and the more backlink it earns from other websites and social media profiles.
While Google doesn’t index Twitter posts and links like Facebook, Twitter posts surrounding trending topics and influencers appear in the search results. If you grow your Twitter account and tweet about trending on the platform – as long as they’re relevant to your brand – you could see your tweets ranking on search engines.
Additionally, Twitter is the only social media platform that sees images shared on its platform appear in Google search results. If you want more imagery to appear than what’s on your website, consider tweeting it.
YouTube
YouTube is the platform you should have a presence on if you want to boost your overall SEO. This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, given the video platform is owned by Google itself.
This is a great gauge for what kinds of video content your brand should be creating if you’re looking for a place to get started.
Why Use Social Media For SEO?
Most of the many different SEO strategies create lots of high-quality, fully-optimized content for blogs and landing pages on your website.
If you really want to ramp up your online presence in 2021, be strategic about your social media use as well. Here are a few solid reasons why:
Social Media Content Still Gets Indexed
Google indexes links shared on Facebook. Photos shared on Twitter also appear in search results. All of this will help lead to even more brand awareness and organic traffic to your business.
Social Content Builds Authority
If you share a post, then someone else re-shares that post, you’re reaching more people, building more discussions around your brand, and building more authority around your content and in your industry.
Social Media Content Increases Backlinks
The more your content is shared on social media, the more likely is it that others will see it, appreciate it, and then link to it from their own website content. This increases your link equity and domain authority, helping accelerate your SEO.
How To Utilize Social Media To Accelerate SEO
Let’s dive into the how-to for using social media to accelerate SEO. We’ve put together a quick six-step process for you to incorporate into your online marketing strategy.
Step One, Optimize Your Social Media Profiles
To really get the most out of your social media platforms, you need to make sure they’re properly branded and optimized.
Be sure to add a cohesive profile photo and cover photo across all of your platforms. Other than that, you need to ensure your brand name is completely accurate and consistent on each platform to strengthen your presence and SEO.
Then it would be best if you wrote a bio to use across each platform as well. Create something brief that accurately depicts what your business does. Also, ensure that it organically includes keywords relevant to your business.
This will let Google know what your business does and what keywords make sense for your business to rank on.
Step Two, Share Website Content On Your Social Sites
One tactic that you must implement as part of your overall social media strategy is to share your website content on social media. This should include both blog content and website landing pages.
It bears repeating, sharing your website content on social media increases its reach and the likelihood that others will share it on social media or link back to it from their websites.
The type of social media posts that share your informational blog content will be different from the social media posts sharing your commercial landing pages. Keep this in mind.
As you grow your online presence, your audience will be more likely to re-share both website content types. In turn, this will help you to build authority further.
Step Three, Use Hashtags
Hashtags are essential for searching purposes on social media websites. Moreover, they help search engines understand what type of content you share.
Be sure to analyze the best hashtags for your brand to reach the largest potential audience with your posts.
Hashtags are most prominent on social media sites like Twitter and Instagram. They are also becoming increasingly important for visibility in platforms like Tik Tok.
You want to be sure you’re using hashtags that actually have visibility. These should also be keywords relevant to your industry. This way you the people finding your posts are those who are interested in your products or services.
Pretty much each post you share on Twitter or Instagram should have some hashtags incorporated. Every platform is different, and the best number of hashtags varies. Twitter best practices say you should utilize just 2-3, while Instagram allows users to add up to 30 to a single post.
Keep an eye on your progress so that you know how many hashtags work best for your brand to generate the most reach, visibility, and clicks on your social posts.
Step Four, Grow Your Social Following
While social media followers tend to be a vanity metric, especially with algorithms widely limiting the number of followers who actually see your content, growing that number should still be an important part of your strategy.
This is because the greater the number of followers you have, the more legitimate your business appears. It’s called the bandwagon effect. People are more likely to follow you if a large group of other people already are.
Plus, the more followers you have, the larger portion of people who could be shown your content. And that’s the real end goal here – increasing your social reach and the earned shares of your content.
Step Five, Build Brand Awareness
Another important step in boosting your SEO through social media is building brand awareness. That is, increasing the number of people who know about or at the very least have heard of your business.
Studies have shown a strong correlation between social media interaction and brand awareness. Brand awareness, in turn, leads to an increased likelihood of purchase.
Aside from more sales, brand awareness will also help to increase branded searches.
Branded searches are powerful for improving SEO because this means people are actually typing your brand name into search engines or social media searches to find you or information about you specifically.
Tactics such as growing you’re following, increasing your reach, paid social ads will put your business in front of as many people as possible. This is the key to building brand awareness.
Step Six, Use Social Listening
There are a few different ways that social listening will improve the ROI of your social profiles.
First, it allows you to monitor how your brand is being mentioned online. This will help you to pinpoint any pain points customers are having and allow you to improve your brand mentions, so they’re all positive.
Second, it gives you the power to learn more about what your audience wants. Monitor keywords related to your business to see how your audience talks about them.
Are there positive mentions? Audience members with reservations about your industry? Target customers talking about what they’re looking for from a business like yours?
Taking all of this information into account is a great way to improve the content you create and promote. In turn, you will further increase the chances that people will see your content and share it because it’s exactly what they were looking for.
Start Accelerating Your SEO With Social Media In 2021!
Ready to start accelerating your SEO strategy? Then, start with your social media. With the information we’ve laid out within this post, you should be ready to adapt your social media strategy in a way that will further improve your social profiles and your brand’s overall visibility.
Continue learning with these 12 steps to complete a local SEO audit for your business.