Once you have found the social media platforms that are best for your purposes, the next step is using that social media influence to boost your search engine results performance. A lot of people know to use social media to build brand awareness and drive new consumers to your organization, but not very many use it to build SEO ranking. When beginning this process, you will want to:
- Create content that gets shared and viewed
- Include relevant links and keywords in the content
- Share the social media page links.
Links generate the best SEO results when the content is repeatedly shared.
This also means that posting a link to your site on your profile bio will not have as good of results as making content that gets highly shared. While sharing helps a lot, what also helps is people liking, following, retweeting and favoriting your posts and page. The best way to make sure that they get shared is to make content that is valuable and interesting to your user base. If you run a local bike shop, you may want to post a video of you on the local trails, or a news story on a new law requiring helmets be worn or adding bike lanes. If you are a marketing agency, you may want to create an infographic or blog post sharing numbers related to your services or industry trends. A political organization may benefit from interactive content that is a call to action, like answering an online poll (Facebook and Twitter has built in polls), or asking for virtual signatures for a petition. Content that is relevant to your follower’s interests is going to have the best results. Don’t be afraid to mix up content types either.
Include relevant links and keyword topics in the content.
This does not mean doing what is known as keyword stuffing. That is essentially just taking keywords people search and just spamming every single sentence with keywords without necessity. The best content will have a topic related to the audience you are targeting, but not need to have keywords forced into it. So if you shared an infographic on your social media, and made a blog post about that infographic, sharing your blog link would be helpful and relevant. If you are a local business trying to share a news article about your town but not your business, it would be out of place to include a link to your products in said post.
Post the social media page on your website, and the website on your social media page.
This adds what is known as authority to each of their respective rankings. Also make sure to include your social media page on your Google Business profile. So you will want to link your Facebook and Twitter prominently on the site’s header, and on the Google Business profile seen from the search results. Also put links to your website homepage on your profiles. This seems straightforward, but you need to make sure to do that to get the most out of your SEO efforts.
