How to Use Your Social Media To Improve Your SEO

Boost your SEO strategy by optimizing your social media with these actionable steps, get started.

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Gone are the days where all digital marketers had to worry about was optimizing a good website.

Today’s SEO professionals know that to win today’s digital arena, website optimization is no longer enough to boost your search engine rankings. As search algorithms become more complex, brands vying for the first page are getting even more competitive in their strategies, planning and implementation.

But what if you don’t have to limit yourself to website optimization?

As the digital marketplace grows, so too do the consumer behaviors. Social media has become the primary stage for brand to consumer interaction, providing a gold mine of engagement. And it is in these social media channels that you stand to gain a fighting chance for ranking on search engines. If you’re looking to boost your SEO and give it an extra edge, read on and discover why social media optimization may just be your secret weapon.

Why should I optimize my social media?

Typically, we only apply optimization to websites. This idea makes sense, considering that nothing else can influence SEO strategies. However, optimizing your social media channels do serve to complement your SEO strategy. Social Media Optimization, or SMO, involves improving the quality of your social media channels. Linking back to your website and populating them with consistent, factual, information and quality content that users can engage with can potentially provide your site with more credibility and traffic. In doing so, you raise the possibility of boosting your overall search engine ranking.

Now that you know the potential of optimizing your social media, read on to find out how to do this and the steps you need to take to prepare for optimization.  

Conduct an Audit on Your Socials

As algorithms and updates continuously change to suit the needs of modern-day users, it is important to build the habit of performing audits on your website. Doing so will allow you to review what works and what doesn’t. This is typically the first step before implementing any major changes to your website. Similarly, optimizing your socials requires reviewing your content and its performance. While every brand may have different ways of running audits with their team, the following details are a great basis for any audit.

• Profile Information (Name and URL)
• Publishing Metrics
• Engagement Metrics
• Channel Specific Metrics
• Referral Traffic
• Audience Demographics

By reviewing these metrics, you can get an idea of your performance across different social media channels to determine what works and what doesn’t. Performing this audit is a necessary step to prepare for succeeding changes for your social media optimization.

Set Your Goals

After reviewing the findings of your audit, you can then begin to review each of your platforms and decide which ones are worth keeping. Managing socials requires a serious investment of time, effort, and manpower, so reserving your sources for platforms that will actually return that investment is a smart way to use your audit findings. Moreover, deciding which ones you plan to keep and why is also a great time to assess the specific goals you want to set per platform. 

For instance, Instagram is a great option to increase awareness and engagement by telling a story with your brand and products, especially for visual industries while Facebook is a great option for reaching users and raising awareness through your business pages and running advertisements. Setting specific goals for benchmarks like page likes, followers, or perhaps page interactions like queries and comments, can also be included when strategizing with your team later on.

Review Your Existing Content

Once you have set your platform goals with your team, it’s time to go over your existing content. This will help you figure out which content to base your new content moving forward, based on the metrics they yielded. After setting your goals, you can then After going through your initial audit with the criteria above, you can then proceed to reviewing and planning your content based on which posts seemed to garner good metrics.

The main details you want to consider are the following:

Key Visuals and Branding

Visuals are an important part of building a social media presence. Though these channels don’t directly contribute to search engine optimization and ranking, Semrush states that user interaction with visuals and posts are considered as vital signs by Google and other search engines when evaluating your website. Investing in careful planning and a design direction that is both on brand– resonating with the kind of image you want, and engaging, boosts chances of channel traffic, and potentially website traffic for as long as your channels link back to your page.

Platform Performance

Once you perform an audit across your active platforms, you can review which platforms you actually want to keep for their ROI. After all, optimizing your social media channels requires resources. After choosing which platforms you want to keep, you can then begin strategizing and planning content geared towards meeting your goals.

CTAs and Content

There is no doubt that visuals are important. However, it is even more important to make sure that your materials communicate the Call to Action, tone, and message effectively to your consumers. Aesthetics can only do so much, and can still fail to meet the goals that you have in mind for your platform. Review your current posts and call to actions and revise them with your desired messaging and goals in mind and construct content and CTAs around your goals. 

Assess What You Can Do

When running multiple social media channels, it is important to keep regularity and consistency. Not only does this boost your channel activity, but it also encourages consistent user engagement, inquiry, and interaction with your platforms. When planning this regularity and consistency, assessing what you can manage at present and even growing your team based on these growing needs is something you can consider down the road.

Pick out ‘Keywords’ for Socials

It’s easy to think that keywords are solely in the realm of your website optimization efforts. To be clear, you CAN’T apply SEO to social media. However, you can make it easier for users to search for you and your social media posts. Your website keywords do not have to go to waste, as you can still use keywords that work well for your website SEO in your social media captions. This improves overall searchability across platforms by utilizing keywords in hashtags and captions.

Lay Out a Calendar

After performing all these steps, you and your team can come together to plan a comprehensive content calendar. You can start small by planning your social activity per month for each platform, and slowly build your way up. This will make it easier to schedule content production, recruit additional manpower if needed, and allows you to play around with your goals and strategies should these need changing later on.

Parting Words

If optimizing your social media seems like a tough task, partnering with a trusted SEO agency is a good place to start! Create an effective social media strategy to supplement your existing SEO optimization and build a game plan today!