How Social Media and SEO Work Hand-In-Hand
Omnichannel marketing campaigns are the backbone of any successful marketing strategy, they allow for seamless and effective targeting of the relevant markets. Two essential digital marketing channels that can effectively work together are social media and SEO. But, how do social media and SEO work together?
Despite social media not being a direct SEO ranking factor, there are several parts of social media that can boost your SEO performance. Here’s why you should be using social media and SEO hand-in-hand to improve your digital marketing performance
Boosting Web Content Performance
A critical part of an effective SEO strategy is web content. Whether that be blogs, product descriptions, page content or even videos, you can’t be visible to an audience or search engines without it. What’s even more important is that the content is optimised for SEO but also for users – long gone are the days of keyword stuffing!
Recent Google updates have focused on penalising low-quality and spammy content, making it ever more important to create content that is high-quality, engaging and useful. Not only will this be recognised by Google and widen your audience, but users are also more likely to be interested, leading to increased engagement levels and conversions.
Social media can play a huge role in boosting SEO performance if your website’s content is helpful and high quality. Engaging content is likely to be shared across social platforms, widening your audience and encouraging people towards your website and overall, increasing and boosting how your content is performing. If Google can realise that people are finding your website and content useful, you will be rewarded with higher rankings.
Gaining Backlinks
Following on from that point, social media is a great way to improve your backlinking strategy. Similar to the engagement aspect, having an optimised SEO campaign that creates high-quality content is likely to aid your backlink strategy.
With more people sharing content you’ve created, they will be linking back to your website, widening your audience whilst increasing the chance of gaining high-quality backlinks. The more high-quality backlinks you have, the higher your website will rank.
Backlinks are a crucial part of SEO and can greatly improve your rankings. If your website is gaining more traction through social media channels, high-quality sources (such as news outlets and industry leaders) are more likely to see the content and credit your website.
SEO For Social Media
SEO can also benefit social media massively. As search engines progress and constantly update, we’re seeing more and more social media profiles and posts beginning to rank on Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). As mentioned, Google prefers authentic, helpful and engaging content – social platforms typically offer just that, especially platforms like TikTok. Take a look at the example below of how videos on TikTok have been ranking on Google’s SERP when searching ‘Things to Do Hull’.
Similar SEO strategies can be used on social platforms to help user-generated content (UGC) rank on both Google’s results pages and social platform results pages. Some of the most common SEO practices to follow on social media are:
- Keyword research & placement
- Hashtags
- Subtitles
- Encouraging engagement
Additionally, X, formerly Twitter, has partnered with Google which has seen more posts/profiles ranking higher for real-time, user-generated content. This is seen more commonly with real-world events, as seen in the below example of the recent Dubai floodings.
Local SEO Benefits
Local SEO is paramount for all businesses, particularly businesses that rely heavily on customers in the local area. SEO strategies for social media, like the ones mentioned above, help your business stand out from local competitors on all platforms and can significantly increase traffic and footfall.
Google Business is a social media platform integrated within Google’s SERP, it allows the business to post updates, product listings, address and opening times. It’s also a great way for customers to interact with the business by sending messages and leaving reviews.
Typically, a Google Business profile will appear if someone types in the business name but it can also appear when a keyword is searched for. It’s an incredibly powerful social media platform for businesses of all sizes and is a prime example of how social media and SEO work hand-in-hand.
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