Using Social Media to Support Your SEO Plan

You might wonder what the connection is between social media and search engine optimization, especially since Google has declared in the past that social media does not affect a website's ranking when it comes to SEO. However, that's only true on the surface, and there is a definite connection between social media and SEO that you might not be aware of. It's kind of a mutually beneficial relationship that brings advantages to both, even though the most knowledgeable marketers may not immediately see the connection. That is primarily because most marketers don't understand how social media can be integrated with SEO, and have never attempted anything like that in their marketing campaigns. The truth is, there are a number of ways in which social media can be beneficial in supporting your SEO plan, and all you have to do is take advantage of some of the recommendations described below.

Social media can be used for links

The greater the extent to which your content is shared on social media platforms, the more viewers and readers it will have. It wasn't long ago that a case study was conducted on a specific web page which got more than 130,000 shares on Facebook. This page soared to the top of the rankings because of critical keyword phrases that it made use of. This is a perfectly good way of creating content and promoting it, but that's not exactly why it became so popular.It isn't really all about how frequently a page gets shared, it has much more to do with the number of links that get circulated among other users who have read your content. Each of those links is like solid gold, and they have the potential to multiply the number of readers your content gets because they can reach even more people. This is not a situation peculiar to Facebook, because the same thing is true on Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, or any other social media platform you can think of. When the content is really good, a great many more people will find it appealing, and the more they share your content with others, the more links you're going to get from all kinds of other websites.

Building an audience

No matter how good your products and services are, they won't sell to any significant extent if nobody on the Internet knows about them. It's essential in today's business landscape for you to reach out to potential customers, rather than adopting the more passive approach and hoping that customers come to you. The best place for you to reach out to potential customers is social media, and there's a good reason for that.

Take Facebook for instance. It now has more than 2 billion active users, and this would be a fantastic audience for you to connect with, so that you can build your brand and increase your online presence. The connection to SEO in this case is that more people will see your website and your brand, so they'll become much more familiar with it. When they start searching for keywords relative to products and services, and see your company name appearing in the search results, they will recognize your company name, and click on it. It's a question of simple familiarity and prior exposure.

Mini search engines

When you think about it, many of the social media websites have become search engines themselves. People don't just go to Google when they're searching for products and services, they also use many of the social media channels to find what they're looking for. Search engine optimization is so broad that it actually includes all those searches which occur on social media websites. This makes a direct connection between the two, and it's something that any good marketer should consider.As an example, consider the person who is interested in finding out more information about your company. Rather than conduct a Google search and simply check out your website, they might look your company up on Twitter or Facebook to see other aspects of your online presence. This makes it important that you establish a significant online presence, and that you post relevant and interesting content there.This will undoubtedly give a big boost to your social media presence, and it will probably also go a long way toward creating trust in your brand among social media followers. Keep in mind that any company which has a strong social media presence has probably also put a lot of information there which can be searched by users. This is a very clear indication of the relationship between SEO and social media, and it's one that you need to account for in your social media marketing campaigns.

Optimize your profiles

You can make good use of social media platforms to optimize your online profiles, and that in turn, can be a powerful resource for attracting attention to your company. Given the fact that it's undeniably important to have a strong online presence, you can see the significance of also optimizing your social media profiles, so that they rank higher in search engines.Any time an Internet user searches for your company name, they'll find your website as well as all the social links which you have, and they'll have all the available information about your business. By filling out everything in your social media profiles completely, and giving users as much opportunity as possible to contact you, you will be making best use of your online profiles.By maximizing your use of social media in general, it will help you climb to the first page of search engine results, and possibly into the top five or six listings on that page. The more clicks that you get from search engine results, the more visitors to your website there will be. And when you start getting a lot more visitors to your site, you'll experience a higher conversion rate, and a great deal more success for your business.