How Social Media Can Influence Your SEO
Did you know that there are almost 2 billion websites in the world in 2021? Thanks to the invention of DIY website construction, more people than ever have set up their own business website.
This has led to crowded market spaces in many industries. How can you ensure that your brand stands out and gets the attention and traffic that it deserves?
The answer is SEO. While SEO may seem to be a complicated subject, there are some basic principles that can make a big difference.
For example, what is the relationship between SEO and social media? How can you use social media to improve your SEO value?
Why not read on to find out how you can make simple changes to quickly increase your SEO.
Make Sharing as Easy as Possible
The key to employing social media in your digital marketing campaigns is to make sharing as easy as possible.
Every interaction that visitors have with your site or pages is a sign of popularity and value. When you encourage and facilitate the sharing of your media, you vastly increase the number of people that interact with your material, and thus its value.
Encourage sharing by adding social share buttons and call to actions (CTA) clearly in your media shares. Use images that are humorous or eye-catching so that people will feel compelled to share them with their friends.
Above all make your content relevant. If it meets the needs of your target audience, then people will see your site as a solution. They will then share the solution with their friends and loved ones.
This is one of the most effective social media marketing strategies. Are you making it easy to share your social media shares?
Create Catchy Captions
Think for a minute of a fisherman choosing the bait to attract fish. This is essentially the purpose of your captions and titles. You want people to notice it and instantly have the desire to satisfy their curiosity.
This is a fantastic tool for your SEO strategies as it plays on the human love of storytelling. We all want to know where it will lead us.
If you are looking to improve your social media captions, what can you do?
We live in a world where click-bait has taken all the low-hanging fruit of the caption world. Now we need to dig deeper to create titles that engender sincerity and trust that clicking the link will actually fulfill what the person wants.
Also, be sure to include your keywords within the titles and captions for extra SEO value. Creating quality titles and captions is not easy; however, it is one of the most important tools you have to bring traffic to your site.
How can you know if your captions and content are successful?
Evaluate and Track Your Progress
While you no doubt measure your site traffic, do you measure the success of your social media marketing efforts? If not you are missing out on vital metrics, why not ask yourself the following questions:
- What is my ROI from social media campaigns?
- Are my profit lines increasing or decreasing?
- What was your most popular share on social media in the last six months?
- What was the biggest flop?
If you are not measuring your progress, you will likely not be able to answer these questions, or at least accurately answer them.
Measuring your social media success will give you the information you need to improve your future efforts. This will help you to increase your traffic overall.
However, once you have brought people to your site, how will you keep them there?
Good Quality Writing Is the Key
Whether you are creating content with local SEO value or global appeal, the quality of your writing is being scrutinized more than ever before. Google algorithms now understand the key features of quality writing and will lower your value if you are attempting to pull the wool over its eyes.
The days of keyword stuffing, poor quality writing, and needless repetition gaining value in Google’s eyes are long gone. If you want to impress Google, you now need good clean writing with human appeal. This is true regardless of the social media platform you use.
Picture yourself in the place of the reader and try to understand their needs. The better you understand the target audiences, the more relevant your content will be.
The quality of your content will no doubt evolve over time. If you see that your older social media shares are not performing as you expect, what can you do?
Take them down, make them relevant, and re-release them for today’s audience. This not only removes underperforming content but reduces your workload for creating new content as you already have the basis for the post.
Further, re-releasing older content allows you to revisit your keyword choices and image selection. Image selection is a crucial part of your social media SEO relationship.
Ensure You Optimize Your Images
People process images far faster, are more quickly impacted emotionally, and grasp the meaning of images much faster than text. The images you choose for your site can vastly increase your value in your guests’, and thus Google’s, eyes.
If you are advertising via Instagram, your image makes up 90% of the post. The choice of image is crucial and defines your post. A great image will result in popularity and further traffic.
However, if you are preparing images for a website or Facebook/LinkedIn page, what do you need to keep in mind? By the way, these principles work well for both global and local region SEO strategies.
Your first step is to optimize your images. How can you do this?
- Choose images that have the correct file size (images that are huge and take time to load will frustrate visitors)
- Ensure that your images will have the correct filename (keywords separated by dashes are often best)
- Images should look as good on small devices as a large retina screen—make sure they are responsive
- Add captions that smoothly draw attention to key details in the image
- Do not forget alt-text, be natural in how much you add though
Images on any social media will make or break the success of your share. There is a greater selection of stock images available than ever before. Make sure that you brainstorm your selections before making a final decision.
How to Get the Best Out of SEO and Social Media and Much More
With each passing year, there are more and more opportunities to improve your SEO by means of video, images, and writing content improvements.
However, understanding the relationship between SEO and social media can give you the major boost you need to increase your Google value.
If you would like to learn more about how to improve your SEO even more and get your branding out in front of the crowd, then we are here to help. Why not check out how to improve your local SEO or contact us for more information.