Social media done well can help you boost your SEO. By creating relevant content on social media, you have a chance to gain new audiences for your website and your business. However, focus on quality, not quantity. You need to make sure that people coming to your website from social media find what they’re looking for, and have a positive experience. This will translate into increased browsing time, decreased bounce rate and more conversions, which will in turn boost your SEO rankings.
So how do you make sure your social media audience finds what they’re looking for on your website? Here are some of our DO’s:
First of all, do decide which social media channels work best for your purpose and your target audience. Create necessary and get rid of any unnecessary channels.
First of all, you need to understand who your customers are and what they’re looking for, and then provide them with a product or service that is a solution to their needs and wants. This should be the end goal of your marketing strategy. Are you a business selling cosmetics to younger people? Or are you a digital agency growing your customer base? Different businesses with different end goals will need a different social media strategy. If you’re targeting young people, you might want to focus on using Instagram or YouTube. If you’re targeting professionals, you might want to use LinkedIn.
Secondly, do create great content and do it regularly, while still thinking about who your target audience is.
Social media is a great tool in enhancing your relationship with the existing and potential customers or audiences. But to be able to build trust and relationships, you need to be proactive on social media. Make sure you create valuable content that you share with your audience on a regular basis. Also, make sure that you utilise the conversational model social media provides you with and engage with your audience. Everyone loves it when their favourite brand replies to their comment or likes their post. Utilise that to create relationships with your social followers. And don’t forget to use great hashtags!
Moreover, do remember to refer to your business and your website on social media to create traffic to your site.
It’s very important to make it as easy as possible for people to go to your website. Referring to your business and providing links in your social media posts will encourage traffic to your site. No one likes seeing a post with a product they’re interested in and then having to find the site it’s listed on by themselves. It’s an unnecessary hassle for your customers. However, make sure your brand doesn’t dominate your content. As we mentioned already, social media is a great opportunity to be more conversational and engage with your audiences. By sharing other people’s content which is relevant to your brand identity and values, you will create more authority and build social trust toward your business.
Finally, do make sure your site is mobile-friendly and contains mobile-friendly share buttons.
If you’re using social media, chances are that your audience will be engaging with your business on their mobile devices. This is why you should make sure that your website design is mobile-friendly. It’s now more important than ever as Google algorithm punishes sites which are not mobile-friendly. An easy way to check for it from your laptop is to shrink your site window and see whether it changes its shape accordingly. Of course, you can also just access the site from your mobile and see what it looks like.
Don’t worry if your site shows a desktop version on your mobile, it is fixable. Different Content Management Systems have their own plugins and ways of tailoring sites for mobile users, and sometimes you won’t even need a developer to make simple changes. For example, all modern Wordpress templates are now ‘responsive’, meaning they already come as mobile-friendly, and allow for further optimisations if there’s a need. Also, do remember to add mobile-friendly social buttons on your pages to make your content easily shareable.
Following these four steps should help you make the most out of social media and use it for improving your SEO rankings. However, there are also things that you should never do on social media, as they might cost you your rankings and reputation. Make sure you avoid making those easily avoidable mistakes and check out our video with don’ts of using social media in SEO.
