The challenge for small businesses today is how to leverage social platforms to effectively get in front of their target audiences through better website positioning on search engines to grow their revenue streams. However, there are specific strategies that you can put into motion designed to make your social media campaign do double duty: engage users on social media and work toward building up your search engine ranking.
Social Media and SEO
Here are some of those ideas for leveraging social media campaigns for SEO:
- Focus on building local brand awareness through social media strategies designed for local search. Snapchat offers on-demand geofilters that you can use to select certain geographical parameters and dates. Then, you can promote your brand by using social media campaigns that generate buzz and links tied to those geographical parameters. This is an ideal strategy if you have a local event that you want to attract your audience to through any searches they might conduct. Another approach is to use Quora to elevate your brand in search engines by answering industry questions that are submitted to this community forum social platform. For example, if you are in the payments industry and can answer questions about digital payments, how to get your clients to pay on time, payment security or new payment technology, then you could post those responses on Quora community sites where those questions are asked and link back to a page on your site or to a blog post, creating the search engine connection.
- Improve indexing by using direct link sources. Some social media sites encourage direct SEO links through the content that you post on your pages. This content is continually crawled by search engines that are then attracted to these direct links, providing a way to index pages and gain traction on the search engine results.
- Take advantage of the high domain authority and ranking potential of certain social sites by using reputation management campaigns. By working on creating profiles that build your brand while also including targeted keywords, you can improve your search engine ranking by creating multiple opportunities for a search listing. The more search listings for your brand, the better your campaign results will be in terms of attracting the largest part of your audience.
- Leverage new social media content integration into Google and Bing search results. Search engines are now incorporating other social media content into search results, providing more opportunities for social media campaign content to increase ranking. For example, you can consider campaigns that use business reviews, videos and images as well as social status updates. The syndication of these social sites can provide more exposure, which means it makes sense to emphasize more social media campaigns that incorporate this type of content.
- Utilize social paid search to garner more link building. Your social media campaign strategy can include paid social ads that also help with your search engine ranking. Target those people who can then link to you, such as journalists and major publications to build more links that will capture the attention of search engines. While it can dig into your budget to do social paid search, it has been shown to generate results that have provided a return in the form of higher ranking, greater traffic and more leads.
While not every aspect of your social media strategy and accompanying campaigns have to be directed at SEO activities, adding this tactic to the overall plan does offer an additional way to generate greater traffic to your site. Just remember that much of your social media plan also has to consider existing customers and include ways to maintain loyalty and increase engagement levels. Together, these two methods are designed to help you attract and retain more customers in a targeted way that provides further return for your overall marketing efforts.
SEO Photo via Shutterstock
[“source-smallbiztrends”]
