Digital marketing involves juggling numerous different strategies. On the surface, they can seem like disparate ways to drive traffic to your website. However, aspects such as SEO and social media marketing often work together.
Social media plays a vital role in search engine optimisation by driving engagement, building brand authority, and increasing traffic to your website.
Understanding how to improve SEO with social media means leveraging platforms to share valuable content, encourage backlinks, and boost your online visibility. By aligning your social media strategies with SEO goals, you can create a cohesive approach that strengthens your digital presence.
SEO and social media marketing
As you may already know, SEO is the process of using various strategies to improve your website’s ranking on Google. It includes keywords but also page layout, image options, and a lot more.
Social media management, on the other hand, typically involves setting up social media pages for your business. You then curate and post content related to your brand to drive engagement and, ideally, traffic to your website.
So, how are SEO and social media marketing linked? Some of the benefits include:
- Brand visibility: social media helps increase your visibility and brand awareness.
- Driving traffic: providing your social pages (or posts) link to your website, you’ll see increased traffic to your website.
- Improved engagement: interesting and shareable posts can help improve your engagement, in turn increasing follows, brand awareness, and website traffic.
The increase in traffic is arguably the biggest benefit for SEO. A search engine’s crawlers look for traffic to your website as “value”, implying you have authority in your domain. In turn, this makes them take more notice of your website, which can improve your ranking in search results.
One thing worth noting is that linking to websites or blog posts from social media doesn’t count as backlinks. These are another important aspect of SEO, but social media links aren’t classified as passing authority back to your website. While linking is important, don’t rely on it as an SEO strategy.
How to use SEO on social media
On the flipside, you can use SEO techniques as part of your social media management. Without diving into too much detail, some of the most important strategies are:
- Keyword research
This is arguably the backbone of an effective SEO strategy, and it can be used to good effect on social media. For example, researching trending hashtags in your domain can help your posts to be more visible in news feeds.Similarly, you can actually use keywords in your posts. Social media platforms often have their own integrated search functions, and these work a lot like Google in that people will see posts containing the words they search. - Page and post optimisation
Another important aspect is to optimise your pages and posts on social media. For example, use plain language, clear visuals and include links and contact information on your pages.Treating your social media pages as an extension of your website optimisation is sensible because it ensures consistency and professionalism.
How to integrate SEO and social media management
If you’re planning to use SEO and social media marketing together (which you should), it’s important to seamlessly integrate them. Here are some techniques:
- Create shareable content
This might seem obvious, but it’s vital to create shareable content that’s worth engaging with. It could be a blog post that you share on Facebook, an Instagram reel that works on other social platforms, or anything else. - Ensure keyword consistency
Similarly, you’ll want to be consistent with your use of keywords. If your objective is to rank well on search engines, it’s best to target a few keywords very well across your SEO strategy. This is true both for paid advertising and organic posts. - Nurture relationships
To get people to visit your website, you’ll need to give them a reason. Having a great product or service is one thing, but it also helps to nurture customer relationships by engaging with them on social media. This improves your brand image and can make people want to engage.
Knowing how to improve the way in which you use SEO with social media can be challenging if you don’t have a keen understanding of how both work together, so it might be worth using an external marketing agency, such as Page1, who can get your SEO and social media aligned.
