How Social Media Affects Your SERP Visibility

People follow you on social media because they want to listen to you. And that gives you an edge over your SEO.

Are you wondering, how?

Well, that’s what we will discuss in this article. We are going to address three different ways in your social media efforts that affect your SERP visibility.

So, let’s begin.

1. Website traffic

The first thing that comes to mind when we combine social media and SEO is “traffic”. Every business, no matter how big or small, aims to drive traffic using social media. LinkedIn has been a market dominator in website traffic. It accounts for 46% of all social media traffic to company websites.

How to drive website traffic through social media?

1. Optimize Your Profile

Whenever people visit a page, their primary source of information to learn more about the brand is the profile. Due to this, you must optimize your profile so that it can drive social media traffic to your website. Here are some tips for optimum optimization:

• Briefly explain your brand and its services
• Add a link to your site. Not just the homepage but other pages including Contact Us or About Us.
• Fill every field in your profile entirely.
  

2. Post when your audience is online

Publish a post when a significant part of your audience is active. Posting something on social media at the peak time increases the referral traffic to your site and the engagement as well.

When you schedule a post on Facebook, the platform suggests you the time slots when most of your audience is active. Also, PostPlanner compiled data to help marketers with the best time to publish on social media.

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3. Make your content easily shareable

If you want more traffic, sharing on social media isn’t enough. You must help the readers to share your content as well. Add social sharing buttons on your blog posts that allow the readers to share your content on their wall conveniently.

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2. Brand authority and awareness

There are 3.8 billion social media users. That’s nearly half of the world’s population.

So, you have a powerful medium at your disposal that can generate a humongous amount of leads for your brand. Also, efficient usage of each medium can boost your brand authority and awareness.

How to boost brand authority and awareness via social media?

1. Post Consistently

The frequency in which you publish a post on social media can affect your brand awareness and authority. Posting frequently allows people to be truly aware of your brand. However, keep in mind that you publish quality posts that people find engaging.

2. Use Hashtags

Using hashtags in your posts or creating a post around hashtags can help in more people being aware of your brand. But remember not to overuse them.

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3. Share your opinion

A study by SproutSocial proved that people want brands to take stands. It can be an excellent opportunity to boost your brand authority and awareness. If you have an opinion, find the most trending hashtag on that topic and share it. You should not be afraid of sharing your opinion, but it is a sensitive territory which can get people to start talking in seconds. So, you must tread it lightly and don’t go against your brand’s ethics and beliefs.

• Profile Optimization
• Posting when most of your audience is online

Such tips (as mentioned in the first point) are also responsible for improving your site’s authority and awareness.

3. Local SEO

Your social media efforts have an impact on your local SEO as well. Including details like working hours, location, contact information, etc. point to better local SEO. It can help the locals discover your business’ social media presence.

How to improve your local SEO using social media?

Follow this roadmap to update/add your page information:

Login to your Facebook account > Edit Page Information

Now, the window you face contains several empty fields that you must fill. Provide accurate details to assist the users in discovering your brand.

Currently, Facebook has diverse page customization options. Instagram also has similar options. You can specify contact information and address (amongst other things) to optimize your profile for local SEO.

How to develop a social media strategy for SEO?

Based on the knowledge you’ve gained from this article until now, here are some tips to formulate a social media strategy that can do wonders for your SEO.

1. Optimize your profile with keywords

Keyword research is the backbone of SEO. It is a baseline that establishes how you will create your content. Similarly, keywords can play a significant role in helping the search engine discover your site’s social media profile.

What you must do is conduct keyword research on your niche and create a database filled with:

• High search volume keywords
• Query-based keywords
• Long-tail keywords

Remember, you must perform ‘right’ keyword research to discover appropriate search terms for your website. You can find countless free keyword research tools that can help you with the process.

After identifying the keywords, prepare your profile info based around the selected keywords organically.

2. Publish quality content

Never EVER compromise on the quality. Never.

I don’t think I can put more emphasis on it.

Jokes aside, quality is something that everyone wants -be it search engines, social media platforms, or users. People follow you because you publish that is rich in information and is helpful. That’s the same way you build trust amidst your audience and turn them into brand advocates.

However, if you compromise on the quality, your numbers are bound to fall. When I talked about ‘posting consistently’, it does not mean that you should start posting anything. You can’t do that.

You have to impart knowledge with your posts that makes the audience feel heard and valuable. So, if you are unable to post consistently, drop the numbers. Post twice a day, but the content must be rich in quality.

3. Use humour and visuals

Posting visuals and using humour in your content can hike the success rate of your social media strategy. The stats are in favour of this argument:

• Visual content is 40 times more likely to get shared on social media than any other form of content.
• Adding images to your Facebook posts increases engagement by 2.3x.
• Tweeting with an image receives 150% more retweets than textual tweets.

Humour triggers a spike in engagement rate as well. Most of the viral content on the internet is humorous.

Have a look at this tweet from MoonPie.

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They have used humour subtly and haven’t gone overboard with it. So, you must maintain a balance when creating a humorous post.

Conclusion

SEO never gets affected by social media directly. Search engines have been unclear about their stand in this. But marketers can utilize the power of social media to improve traffic, engagement, reach, authority, and awareness of your brand.

All of these factors affect your site’s SEO directly and can enhance your online visibility. Months after following these strategies, you will see a significant improvement on your site’s SERP rankings.

Do you think I miss something? Let me know about your suggestions in the comment section below, and I’ll be happy to make it a part of this article.

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This is a guest post by Sahil Kakkar. Sahil is the CEO and Founder of Rankwatch – a platform, which helps companies and brands stay ahead with their SEO efforts in the ever-growing internet landscape. Sahil likes making creative products that can help in automation of mundane tasks and he can spend endless nights implementing new technologies and ideas. You can connect with him and the Rankwatch team on Facebook or Twitter.

Other posts by Sahil

• How to Identify FAKE Social Media Influencers
• Simple Strategies to Optimize Your Stock Photography Website
• How To Run A Successful Facebook Ads Campaign
• How To Get Started With Podcast SEO

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