Enhancing Your SEO with Social Media: 5 Effective Strategies
SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization, is a buzzword in the digital marketing realm. But what exactly does it mean? SEO involves maximizing website visibility by ensuring it appears high in search engine results, such as Google. When you're aiming to promote your product or brand online, SEO becomes critically important. As people actively search for solutions, it's crucial for your website to be easily discoverable on Google. While there are numerous SEO best practices and pitfalls for websites, today we'll focus on harnessing the power of social media to support your brand's SEO efforts.
How are Social Media and SEO Linked?
To clarify, your individual social media posts are not indexed or searchable on Google. The goal is not to make your posts appear on Google but rather to enhance the visibility of your social media profiles and website. So, how can social media contribute to SEO? By producing shareable and engaging content, you can gradually generate more website traffic and have your posts linked by external sources.
5 Practices to Leverage Social Media for SEO Benefits:
1. Include Your Website in Your Bio
As depicted in the infographic, the most direct way social media can influence SEO is through users seeing your posts, visiting your profile, and clicking on the link in your bio. This drives traffic to your website and improves your rankings on Google. Incorporate clear call-to-actions (CTAs) in your captions to encourage followers to visit your website frequently.
2. Consistently Create Quality Content
Creating high-quality content, a practice you should already be doing to gain social media followers, is highly recommended by Forbes as the most effective way to improve your SEO through social media. By crafting remarkable content, the likelihood of people visiting your website increases significantly. Shareable content also plays a role in boosting SEO. In this context, "shareable" means users copying the link to your post and incorporating it into their own articles or sharing it on other social media platforms. Although it may not be easy to fit this type of sharing into a casual call-to-action, if you produce valuable educational content, others will be inclined to link your information to their own content. Continue your hard work in content creation, and over time, it will positively impact your SEO.
3. Utilize Keywords in Your Posts
Since Instagram introduced keyword search, social media platforms now function as search engines too. While you should already have brand-related keywords in your bio, it's essential to incorporate those words into your post captions as well. Consider what people might be searching for related to your brand when writing your captions. For example, if you sell baby jewelry, ensure the words "baby jewelry" appear in most of your posts. By teaching Instagram about your content, it will display your posts to users searching for your product.
4. Optimize Your Visuals
Alt-text plays a crucial role in enhancing SEO. Facebook generates automatic alt text for every photo you post, but you can customize it with a more detailed description. On Instagram, you must add your own alt text to each photo since it doesn't generate it automatically. When writing alt text, consider users with visual impairments and provide a descriptive, non-spammy description of the photo. If relevant, you can include a keyword, like "baby jewelry," when posting a photo featuring your baby jewelry. However, avoid unnecessary keyword stuffing. Additionally, pay attention to the file name of your photos when posting them on platforms like Pinterest, your website, or a blog. Ensure the file name contains relevant keywords separated by dashes or spaces. For instance, if you're posting a photo of a handbag to Pinterest, name the file something like "handbag-black-leather-tote.jpg" before uploading it. This approach gives your photo a head start in terms of searchability.
5. Start Blogging
If you want to grow your social media following and improve your website's SEO, start writing a blog that resides on your website. Increasing the amount of content related to your brand provides more searchable content for users to discover. When writing blog posts, include links to reputable sources that support your content. By choosing high-ranking links, your website will be perceived as higher quality by Google.
To amplify the impact of a single blog post, repost it on different free platforms with varying titles (using the same title for every post may flag Google and lower your search ranking). Share your blog post on Medium.com along with the URL from your website's blog post. Post it on Reddit.com, and create a LinkedIn article as well, remembering to include the original URL each time you repost your blog to drive traffic to your website. Essentially, by writing one blog post, you can position your brand across searchable platforms, including Google, at least four times.
