Introduction to Social SEO
Social SEO is a growing trend that combines social media with search engine optimisation strategies to attract more customers and clients to your business. By understanding these strategies and how to implement social SEO, your business could grow and increase awareness quickly.
Everything we do online is watched and analysed by algorithm’s. Social SEO is achieved by Marketers adding keywords and relevant information not just in front where the customer can see it but also in subtitles, captions and alt-text as well. This improves the chances of the posts / images being found in a search on a social media app.
Looking at the available data right now, a majority of 18-30 year olds are more familiar with using Social search, rather than Google search and as they grow up, this may likely increase, which is why this trend has been recognised.
We must now as Marketers and Business Owners understand and integrate this method into our marketing strategy. This does not mean the end of traditional SEO strategies! It does mean we now have to start combining both Social and traditional SEO, and then our businesses could see an increase in website traffic and a higher online search engine presence.
However, bringing together these two ideas is a lot easier said than done. Businesses need to create high-quality content that these younger social media users want to interact with, and then improve that content further with rich keywords and meta descriptions to appease search engines.
Strategies for Implementing Social SEO
Now we better understand what and why we should do this for our own business, let’s discuss how to implement this for ourselves. In an ideal world, it would be nice to use all of these but if you can’t due to time and budget restraints its still possible to use as many as you can and it should make a noticeable difference.
It’s important that all of our social profiles are kept fully updated on a consistent basis and adding the relevant keywords about our business in our bios,description and other fields like products, services and business categories to ensure the profiles are readily discoverable.
What really makes social SEO work is creating very high quality, engaging content that serves our customers and make them want to fully interact with it. This could be in the shape of infographics, videos, blog posts, podcasts, etc. The easiest way to do this is to use really eye catching images as this will stop your audience in their tracks as they perpetually scroll.
You must do your best to encourage conversations on your social channels. This can be done with questions, polls and asking for their feedback and opinions.
The simple act of responding to comments and feedback is also essential, seeing as you’ve gone to the trouble of asking to respond! Having a strong social listening presence or tool will be instrumental in making this work to your benefit as well.
Finally, don’t forget to use any User Generated Content that you have been given and reward them by sharing on your social media. If they have gone to the trouble to create it and share on their own platforms it’s a useful acknowledgement to them.
As you’re creating this social SEO, be sure to use the relevant and trending hashtags and make sure to add your own branded hashtags where relevant.
Have you got an Influencer you can work with (Influencer Marketing)? If you do, you can have them create content that features your product and services and maybe they would be appreciative of blogging on your own website to widen their own audience?
Just like your Influencer, it’s massively beneficial for you to create backlinks to your own digital footprint. Look at other industries (social media can work with website and graphic designers) or directories that share your audience and see about creating content like blogs or videos that will signpost their audience back to yours. Make sure to add a call to action, asking them to share the blog etc to their social media to widen it further again.
If you have the budget, consider supporting all of this organic reach with paid reach and run targeted ads that draw people to your website and social channels. Once they reach your website, you can then run retargeting ads and catch them again!
I would also actively encourage you to use the likes of Google Business Profile. It is still (currently) more powerful than social SEO and optimises you on social search, almost more than anything else!
Keep monitoring and updating your knowledge on upcoming trends, by following useful sites or perhaps an industry leader as this one came out very quickly and others could do the same. The only way our businesses can stay relevant is by keeping an eye on what we need to know or do, next.
With all of this in mind, you still must monitor, track and analyse what’s working or not using your native or 3rd party insights. This will all be for nothing if you don’t. So make sure to have a regimen of some description that you can keep you accountable.
Implementing all or some of these strategies can help business owners leverage social media to enhance their SEO efforts, drive more traffic to their websites, and ultimately increase their / our business's visibility and engagement online.
If you need some guidance with this for your own business, please contact me today.
Working with clients Nationwide from base in Mullingar.
