The two most discussed terms of Online Marketing that never get old are SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Social Media. Even after years of contemplations and debates, it is still unclear if social media has a direct impact on Google search rankings or not, but the indirect benefits of aligning both channels are well known and indisputable.
So, without further ado, let’s unfold why marketers should include Social Media in their SEO strategy and how Social Media and SEO together can pave a way for any business’s success.
SEO vs Social Media Marketing: An Introduction
In simple terms, SEO and Social Media Marketing are the roots of Digital Marketing. What differs both is that on one hand, SEO helps a business’ website or webpage have visibility on search engines like Google, Bing & Yahoo. Whereas on the other Social Media Marketing intends to build a business’ brand presence on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
Now that you have a fair idea of what is the primary aim of both marketing strategies, let’s look at some more intricacies of both marketing channels.
Benefits of SEO for Businesses
Search Engine Optimization has numerous benefits for a business’s online presence. SEO encompasses various activities that lead to long-term exponential growth. Businesses and marketers that invest in SEO build credibility and trust with their audiences, making it a pivotal part of their brand’s digital marketing strategy. Let’s look at some of the major benefits of SEO for businesses.
- SEO targets the full spectrum of the marketing funnel – Content plays a major role in SEO and how SEO caters to the entire marketing funnel.
At the beginning of the marketing funnel, SEO helps in building brand awareness by enabling a businesses website to get visibility of search engines which ultimately leads to lead generation as a prospective customer is intrigued to connect with the brand, once the lead is generated, the next step is to nurture the lead and finally convert it into sales, all of this is done through effective content marketing and well-strategized SEO activities that include classified submission, bookmarking, backlinking, etc. - SEO reaches your entire target audience – SEO works best for organizations with multiple groups of target audiences. You might have implemented or have noticed marketers and businesses implement marketing campaigns focusing on a defined target audience but with SEO it doesn’t have to be like that. SEO can help businesses attract a greater share of audience with intent at a given point in time, no matter what stage of the buyer’s journey they are a part of.
- SEO Boosts Credibility- People often turn to search engines when they are looking for something, and if a business’s website or content appears within the first few search engine results for the visitor’s query it ultimately represents that the website or content is credible, worth trusting and engaging with. Thus building a credible brand presence that yields quality traffic to the website.
- SEO Improves Engagement Rates – An optimized website brings in quality traffic. And once the visitor is navigated to your website by search engines, and can easily resonate the website’s content with his intent, they are likely to spend time browsing, and once this engagement has paved its roots, it ultimately leads to more conversions and increased ROI.
Benefits of Social Media for Businesses
Social media has now become a substantial part of every marketer or business’s marketing strategy, and the benefits that strategic use of social media offers are so great that any brand not implementing this cost-effective resource is certainly missing out on a phenomenal marketing opportunity to engage with their target audience.
- Increased Brand Awareness – One of the most seamless ways to derive attention to a business or brand is Social Media Marketing. Implementing an efficient social media strategy will increase the business’s online visibility, brand recognition and begin building a reputation as a credible business. Each content piece that is shared on a business’s social media page is introduced to numerous networks of individuals, which increases the chance of potential customers, and the more people know about a business, the more conversions are yielded.
- Better customer satisfaction – We live in an extremely competitive era, where people have the shortest attention span on the internet, and amongst the rat race of businesses and brands, the winners are those who effectively cater to their customers while offering them the best experience.
Social Media eases the business’s efforts to provide a commendable brand experience, by humanizing the brand and creating a voice for the company on various social media platforms. There are various ways to extend customer support to your audience on social media and every social interaction with your customer is an opportunity to publicly demonstrate a business’s compassion for their customers, thus building and nurturing a long-term relationship with the target audience. - Improved Brand Authority & Loyalty – There are two major aspects of making a business authoritative – Customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. But both are built by continuously nurturing the trust of the customers and communicating with them. When people notice people sharing their great experience about a business on social media, and the business reciprocating the effort by replying to customers and posting original content, it shows new visitors a brand’s value and brand authority thus making a brand appear more credible and worth resonating with.
- Great Way to gain Market Insights – There’s no better way to gain market insights than Social Media. Utilizing social media channels as a complementary research tool can help gain information that will aid in understanding the industry better. Not just this, Social Media offers an incredible opportunity to segment content syndication, and identify the effectiveness of the content while also enabling one to measure conversions based on posts on various social media platforms to find the perfect strategy for generating revenue.
How Social Media Supports SEO
When a business plans to be a part of the online marketing ecosystem, the first step is to gain an insight into the market and the target audience. Once the target audience is identified, what is the next step?
Yes, you guessed it right it’s the content. It often becomes overwhelming to curate content for a brand regularly, which is where businesses can leverage social media curation tools to create relevant content for their target audience.
And when this curated content is shared on various social media platforms, it ultimately creates brand awareness and intrigues the target audience to explore more about the business or brand. Once the interest is triggered the potential audience turns towards the website which results in higher website traffic (Remember, increase in website traffic is one of the primary goals of SEO!) and an increase in social engagement.
With more eyes on your content, you increase the chances of someone linking to it. Since backlinks are a huge part of SEO. They intend to show search engines that other people find the content on your website valuable.
Further when there’s an increase in backlinks, increase in traffic, social media engagement, and the brand community starts growing, these consistent interactions between a business and its customers lead businesses to appear credible and authoritative, ultimately resulting in search engines noticing and indexing the content.
A brand’s content once indexed with a greater share of impressions and engagement, the rankings of the website automatically increase, and the visibility of the brand improves organically.
And this is how Social Media supports SEO and enables a business to turn their digital marketing goals into reality.
3 Strategies to combine Social Media & SEO for Better Results
To yield the best results it is of utmost importance to build a link between the two marketing channels Social Media and SEO. Marketers and businesses often miss out on small intricacies that can lead them to leverage the empowering asset of Digital Marketing.
For example businesses and brands often focus on getting an impressive techy website but forget to link their social channels on the website, or vice versa some brands focus on creating and sharing engaging content on social media but do not link the content to the website. Now, this missing link can be one of the reasons why a business is not getting the engagement they envisioned for.
Let us have a look at some of the proven strategies to combine both marketing channels and leverage the benefits.
- Align your Online Content and the People Associated with it
Often the most common mistake that businesses make is not aligning the marketing teams. People working on social media need to be well aligned with the people working on content for various marketing activities. In today’s marketing era, social media and SEO have to work together to give the best results.
- Share your Content on Both Channels to Boost Engagement
The best practice to combine Social Media and SEO is by sharing the content strategically on the channels. For example – If you host a webinar full of insightful information and embed it on your website, why not share it on social media to get the most engagement possible? Similarly, if there’s a social media post that’s getting the most engagement or impressions, why not make a small content piece of an article out of it to share on your website?
Any business that intends to cater to their target audience needs to syndicate content according to the presence of their target audience, not just where they think it will be suitable to post.
- Ensure that your Content is not Platform-Specific
Any content that the brand shares should necessarily be created to repurpose according to the requirements. Make sure that you create content pieces with some interesting visual assets and intriguing one-liners and quotes so that the content can be linked, shared, and repurposed without hurting SEO.
Try and embed various social media posts and statuses within blog posts and articles. Embedding links of content pieces on both channels will increase the chances of someone clicking and visiting, thus resulting in a follow, like, share or comment.
Conclusion
Social media and SEO both are all about getting customer engagement and building a credible brand presence. And one element that drives both is Content. The more unique and intriguing content you share, the chances of audience engagement increases.
Now the one lingering question would be, how are you going to share your content on various social media platforms, well we live in a technologically advanced world, and we can automate anything and everything that we wish to. So, with the help of social media automation tools, you can seamlessly plan on sharing content on as many social platforms that you want to share your content to.
All you need to remember is that your content should always align the two roots of Digital Marketing – Social Media & SEO.
About Author
Astha Raizada is a Senior Content Writer at SocialPilot. Content Writing and Digital Marketing is her area of expertise. She is an avid reader and writer, mostly found with a book in her hand. When not reading or writing, she enjoys crossword puzzles, painting, and doodling.