Think about the last time you looked for a restaurant on Google. It could have been on vacation or even in your hometown if you’re looking to try something new.
You do a simple search of “city name+type of food+restaurant” and see what comes up. You and your friends are hungry and 21st century consumers, so chances are you’re not going to be looking past the first 5-6 listings that are on the page.
There are plenty of ways to boost your SEO, using strong keywords, registering your business with Google, etc. but today we’re going to be focusing on how social media can boost your SEO.
SEO is incredibly important for any business and anyone that tells you otherwise is either crazy or misheard your comment or question. The most important thing, however, is making sure your target audience is people who are likely to use social media. Even though there are over three billion social media users, you want to make sure your use of social media is efficient.
Depending on age and other factors, your target audience may be more inclined to use Facebook instead of Instagram or the opposite way around. In order to make sure that social media is helping boost your SEO, you need to make sure your audience is social media users.
Without further ado, let’s run through the ways that social media can help boost your company’s SEO.
Boost Traffic
The reason social media exists is to well, be social. Think about your personal account and how you share photos, news stories, or communicate with friends. You want your social media account to communicate and interact with followers.
That means sharing your website, advertising promotions, talking about sales, or republishing content across multiple channels.
Photo source:https://marketingland.com/how-to-maximize-social-media-traffic-to-your-site-261158
The more views, likes, and shares you have mean the more people will click on your website and visit the page. It’s a great way to organically generate traffic and draw people to the pages you want them to visit.
The more traffic you have, the higher your page will eventually rank as search engines will see your website as being more trustworthy.
Encourages Local Activity and Engagement
All businesses, but small businesses especially, want to boost their local SEO. If you’re running a business in Chicago, it’s not that important for you to show up on the top results in Billings, Montana.
You already want to be as engaging as possible, but you should look to pinpoint in on your local engagement. Link to local events, push content that targets local customers, host Q&A segments with people in your area, and more.
This tactic still boils down to boosting local traffic and driving up your number of visits. In addition, the more locals you have visiting your website the better it will be ranked by search engines or tools like Google My Business.
Build Up Those Links
Perhaps the most powerful tool for social media is the potential for link-building. Think of how many websites have linked to social media or provided an in-page plugin for a tweet or Instagram photo.
The more shares you have, the more links you have, the stronger the links become, and the higher your ranking will soar.
You need to be making high-quality content that can be linked across multiple platforms. That can be on any platform. The more links your content has spread out across the web, the more likely your SEO is going to be built up. All those links will help bring more attention to your domain name and business overall.
Branch Out to Videos
Everyone has one a favorite YouTube video, but YouTube can also be a powerful social media tool. Video marketing is on the rise and is now recognized as being one of the most powerful forms of marketing out there.
YouTube bridges the gap between being a search engine, social media page, and website. Depending on who you ask, YouTube is actually the second most used search engine in the entire world.
Photo source: https://www.mushroomnetworks.com/infographics/youtube—the-2nd-largest-search-engine-infographic/
That means it’s a great way for you to promote your content and business, helping drive traffic up.
Video content is also highly likely to be shared as well. Videos lead to brand establishment which can lead to more links and eventually more traffic.