Have you ever considered how social media and SEO work together to create increased business potential? You’re not alone! Many business owners fail to recognize the amazing potential that combining two seemingly disparate avenues can have. Yet, leveraging social media for your business can increase SEO rankings and improve website traffic. Businesses need to use social media for more than feline favorites and side-splitting memes; establishing a branded, constant social media channel has incredible SEO advantages that help businesses in ways other than typical search engine reach. Learn more to get started!

How Social Media and SEO Are Related

Although social media and SEO seem at first glance to be two separate components of online interaction, they can function together in several arenas. Where SEO boosts a company’s website ranking on search engines for keywords, social media equity promotes brand awareness and an effective online reputation.

1. Brand Awareness The more people who know your brand, the more they can go out and search for your website and cite your business or link to your articles. All this brand-centric activity helps improve your own SEO over time.
2. Social Signals Affect SEO, yet you need to keep in mind that Google also uses social signals to rank websites and present higher-ranked sites to searchers more frequently. A social signal is a share, like, comment, etc., which determines how much people appreciate what you’ve put out there. Thus, the more people who create active engagement on social media, the more it signals to search engines that your content is valuable, thus indirectly generating better SEO.
3. Responsible for Good Content Irrespective of social media or SEO happening, the best of both worlds requires good engaging content. If you can post good, engaging content on social media that people want to share, they will also link back to it and cross-reference it for SEO purposes. The more activity generated around that epic-worthy content, the more it will generate traffic from the public that increases backlinks and increases your website’s authority.
4. Drive Traffic to Your Website Social media posts that include links to your website can drive traffic to your actual site. Every time someone clicks through from your post to your website, that’s traffic going in your direction. This not only allows you to potentially convert this person into a paying customer, but it also signals to Google that you’re a legitimate website with active followers, helping your SEO ranking.
5. Building a Better Brand Reputation Building a brand reputation through social media is easy; answering questions via comments is a surefire way to establish a good brand reputation. Good brand reputation equals more backlinks, more mentions, more engagement—all positive SEO factors. The more people feel that your brand is trustworthy, the more they’ll share your content, helping you with SEO over time.

Ways to Use Social Media to Improve SEO

1. Create Shareable Content The more shareable your content is, the more it is likely to travel across social media channels. Shareable content brings added links to your URL back to the site, which is a direct benefit for your SEO. Creating shareable content happens when you select topics that are either interesting, informative, or entertaining.
2. Incorporate Hashtags Hashtags allow people to discover their content on Instagram and Twitter. Researching and implementing effective hashtags—especially those that are trending—places your content in a better position to be found, which benefits when someone re-shares your written work and subsequently increases traffic to your site, assisting SEO.
3. Share Across Various Social Media Sites Do not limit exposure to one source. Share everywhere. More content can be seen, from Facebook to LinkedIn to Twitter to Instagram to TikTok, the better chance it can be cited in articles and other works, as well as mentioning your brand anywhere online—which gives you legitimacy and backlinks to your site, assisting SEO efforts.
4. Engagement Matters More than Likes. Sure, likes are fun, but in the world of SEO, social media engagement (comments, shares, DMs, etc.) is much more important. When you’re in the trenches, engaging with your social audience, you’re fostering relationships that will enable them to spend more time using and engaging with your content. Increased engagement tells search engines that your content is helpful to users and that it means something.
5. Use Social Media to Generate Backlinks. Backlinks are important for SEO since they let search engines know that relevant and credible sites are citing your work. One way to generate backlinks is through social media exposure. If credible sites and personalities see your work on social media and cite it in pieces of their own, it generates backlinks, great for your SEO.
6. Review Social Metrics. If you don’t review social metrics, you’ll never know if your social campaigns are successful. Through analytics, you can determine engagement metrics, CTR, conversion rates, etc. This information shows you what social efforts create more traffic and engagement and how to adjust efforts for improvement. Use this information to bolster your understanding of content creation.

Social media can no longer be ignored. When used appropriately, it can positively impact your SEO objectives and deliver the necessary metrics to achieve rankings, traffic, and visibility. With high-quality content, regular engagement, and proper cross-channel (and possibly cross-internal linking) promotion, high palatable growth is measurable and effective for your business. Social media and SEO are synergistic; use them to your advantage.

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