SEO and social media are both crucial components of any modern digital marketing strategy.
Though social media may not be a direct Google ranking factor, the value placed on content and its impact on your brand equity can have a tremendous impact on your site’s ability to rank and attract organic traffic.
Here’s five effective techniques to adopt in order to maximize your reach through social media and SEO.
Focus on Evergreen Content
All too often, marketing teams can get caught up in the pressure of responding to current events and new developments in their organization’s industry, leading to a focus on posting short-form content at a rapid rate.
Though publishing content around hot topics can certainly help with engagement, the short lifespan of these kinds of posts can limit their potential as targets for link building campaigns.
Link building agencies typically define evergreen content as “content that’s designed to remain relevant indefinitely, as opposed to posts that cover emerging news or try to latch onto passing trends”.
Although quality evergreen content isn’t nearly as easy to produce as putting out shorter, more ephemeral posts, their long-term value as a trustworthy, authoritative traffic magnet, and as a target for link building campaigns, can’t be overstated.
If your content calendar has been characterized by shorter posts and higher publishing frequency, consider planning pieces of evergreen content to bolster your SEO and content marketing efforts for the long term.
Use Tools to Consolidate Your Social Media Strategies
You don’t have to be a marketing genius to know that different social media platforms are more attuned to different audiences. Your social media strategy probably reflects this by adapting your posts from one platform to another.
You may use LinkedIn for B2B thought leadership pieces and running webinars relating to your client’s industry, while Instagram is used for more customer-facing posts that showcase products, company culture, and ethical business initiatives.
Adapting your social media activity to different audiences certainly has its benefits. However, if you lack a centralized way of managing your campaigns, you can quickly find each platform going in its own direction without a shared goal or sense of identity.
Using tools to consolidate your social media accounts will save a lot of time when it comes to curating content for different pages and pushing posts live at the perfect time.
Aside from this, it will also keep your marketing team in the loop with what’s going on across all your social profiles, ensuring that everyone’s singing from the same hymn sheet and able to maintain a consistent voice no matter where your audience finds you.
Leverage Social Listening to Inform Your Content Calendar
Social listening refers to the practice of analyzing social media conversations for mentions of your clients’ brand, customer feedback, emerging trends, and much more.
As Google’s algorithms become more and more effective at using user engagement signals to serve up the right results, social listening has become a great source of information that brands can use to align their social media and SEO activities with what their audience wants.
There are many ways you can use social listening to inform your content calendar and publish content that’s more engaging to your audience, including:
- Monitoring brand mentions to study conversations around your company, identify brand advocates, and address any negative feedback or perceptions in relevant content.
- Monitoring industry trends and planning content that showcases your unique take on developing news.
- Identifying popular customer interests and ways to cover these in your posts.
- Tracking the frequency of questions that customers have about your client’s products or services, and tailoring FAQs or tutorial content around them.
- Studying the successes and failures of your competitors and taking cues from this for a more effective content strategy.
Though it’s better to plan content with a long-term vision than to work reactively based on the whims of social media, the patterns you pick up on through social media can go a long way in helping your content’s potential to rank.
Align Your Content Forms With Your Audience
Whether on social media or your client’s website, the kinds of content you publish can have a major impact on how much traffic it generates.
Many brands tend to follow the path of least resistance when they’re choosing content formats for their calendar, leaning towards content types where their marketers have the most experience or those that are less resource-intensive and allow them to publish content at a faster rate.
However, if you put these considerations to one side and focus on content forms that are aligned with your audience, you’ll soon see a much greater return on your efforts.
The first thing to consider when reviewing the forms of content you publish is the market factors that can affect the way your audience looks at businesses like yours.
If companies in your client’s industry need to develop a high level of trust before they start moving the needle, then you’ll need to invest in longer, more in-depth articles that prove your expertise.
If your client sells a consumer product that’s more suited to viral awareness-spreading, then eye-catching visuals and short videos are probably the way to go.
It’s also important to consider where your ideal buyer personas are spending most of their time online, and what they’re hoping to achieve by consuming their favorite kinds of content.
If your client’s audience is looking for helpful tutorials, then it’s a good idea to invest resources in mid-to-long-length YouTube videos linking back to your blog. If you’re targeting B2B stakeholders who want to stay up-to-date on industry trends and best practices, you may be better off with in-depth written content or detailed infographics.
Success in modern content marketing depends on several different content formats, but getting the proportions right in a mix that suits your audience will be a huge boon to your website traffic.
Collaborate With Influencers to Build a Diverse Backlink Profile
A diverse backlink profile is a strong backlink profile. Having links from a healthy variety of sources will protect you from signs of link manipulation, while also acting as a kind of insurance against the unpredictability of Google algorithm updates.
Leading SEO tool provider Wordstream states that “by keeping things varied, you’re protecting your site in case Google changes the rules and marginalizes certain links, certain sites or linking patterns.”
Nurturing relationships with influencers on social media, and then collaborating with them on link building opportunities, can be a great way to ensure your client’s backlink profile stays authoritative and relevant.
With each link you gain through your relationships with industry influencers, you’ll not only bolster your backlink profile with a high-relevance link but also improve the chances that other influential webmasters will see your content and link to you in the future.
Though it won’t bring you a flood of new visitors overnight, developing a natural, diverse link profile will supercharge your rankings and improve your organic traffic over time for targeted keywords.
Joining Forces…
Though social media and SEO may seem disparate on the surface, there are a number of ways you can make these marketing disciplines complement each other and facilitate a stronger flow of traffic to your client’s websites.
We hope these strategies help you gain new insights on the current state of your social media and SEO, and develop a stronger, more cohesive strategy for the future.
