June 15, 2023
When it comes to increasing traffic to your website, it’s more important than ever to be present across multiple platforms to ensure the best visibility of your brand. The key to really nailing this strategy is to ensure your platforms are working together as part of an omnichannel strategy.
If you’re looking to increase the visibility of your website, introducing SEO tactics into your social media strategies can help get you on your way.
SEO for social media, or social SEO, is simply applying the same tactics you would for search engines to your social media channels. It combines the two strategies to help improve your position in search results, but also on the social platforms themselves, in order to increase traffic, and hopefully boost conversions on site.
The key takeaway here is that neither SEO or Social Media should be working in silos; so it’s helpful to get all of your marketing teams talking to one another to ensure a streamlined strategy exists.
Firstly it’s important to note that investing in your social media presence can actually help boost your overall search visibility. While Google may not necessarily consider social media as a ranking factor, it certainly recognises the part it plays in driving traffic to your website.
When you share content across social media platforms, and your audience engages with this, it has the potential to increase visibility, improve traffic and generate backlinks. These create social signals that notify Google, confirming that your site is viable with quality content.
Not to use the age old saying ‘content is king’, but it is your most valuable resource. However, the importance should be placed on the quality of the content itself. Of course when it comes to social media, highly visual, high-resolution images and video work best, but is it actually educational? Does your content encourage engagement? This applies both to your social media captions and the written content you put on your website.
Google, and social platforms, reward content that creates a beneficial user journey and encourages engagement. The higher the engagement, the better it will perform overall.
Sounds obvious doesn’t it, but you’d be surprised how little content is shareable, and how easy brands make it to share their content. The key here is to consider your call-to-actions both on your website and social posts to encourage re-sharing across multiple platforms.
Simple things such as checking you have sharing options on and adding social sharing buttons to your blogs help make this super easy for users, and therefore more likely to be shared online.
If you want to build your brand’s presence online, then it’s vital to ensure your social media profiles are accurately optimised. A simple google search will show that social profiles are indexed and appear in the SERPs, so it’s an additional opportunity to engage with your audience.
The best ways to do this is to follow this quick checklist:
If you can say yes to all of the above, then you’re on the right track – just be mindful to keep these up to date of any changes.
Much like optimising copy on your website, you should be using keywords on your social media posts. Utilising tools such as SEMrush and Ahrefs can help you understand the ones you should be targeting for your website, and these are just as important for social as well. Of course you won’t be able to target as many, so consider which ones align best with your brand and content, then go from there. You could create content pillars and then assign keywords to these so you always know which ones to be using against certain topics.
Additionally take a look at what’s trending on each social media platform and align your content to this if possible. For example, something like #bbqrecipes could be trending on TikTok, so take a quick look into SEMrush to find associating keywords that you can add into your captions, hashtags and the content itself – even voice counts here too.
Just like any SEO tactic, don’t overstuff your content with keywords or you’ll have a negative impact on your results. A few topline keywords should do the trick.
By now we know how important visual content is to the success of any social post, and even a good website. But the work doesn’t stop there. Considering accessibility in your content is hugely important to the success of it.
Utilising alt-tags, and even providing clear descriptions in the captions, will ensure that your content can be reached by all users. You can put keywords in here too, but only if it’s completely relevant and explains the image to the user. If you’re adding videos, then make use of video captions. Most platforms have this built in, but it’s fairly easy to create SRT files and upload these alongside your video.
The bonus is most social channels are aware of the importance of accessibility and have clear guidelines and resources available, so make good use of these.
If you’re now on board with nailing your social media SEO, then it’s time to combine the two and ensure your channels are working together. There are several ways you can leverage the two, but the main thing to remember is that any content you create can be repurposed across multiple channels.
Create a clear content schedule so you can pinpoint important dates, such as seasonal trends or key product launches you have coming up. From there you can determine what content is needed and how this can be distributed across your channels. For example, if you know you’re creating a new Easter landing page, then this can be shared with your organic social team to point towards in any campaign content they’re pushing out. This works for all channels too, like email and paid media.
So while investing in your social media presence may not help you instantly jump up the SERPs, it certainly will help with overall visibility. And if you’re looking to delve deeper into social media SEO, our guide on TikTok SEO will help you learn how to appear in TikTok searches. If you’d like to chat about to us about SEO get in touch, we love a good chat!