Using Social Media for SEO

We’ve all probably heard that our businesses should be using social media to capture the attention of consumers who use it every day. Social media is becoming more a part of online marketing, so here’s some practical insight into using social media for SEO, inspired in part by an episode of Moz’s Whiteboard Friday.

Having and maintaining your social profiles can give you a boost in your SEO and help you rank higher within search engines. As a result, more consumers will find your product or service.

Use your social profiles to create direct links to your website

Using your social media platforms is an excellent way to create direct links to your site. It’s easy: just be sure to have a link in each of your social media profiles (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) that takes viewers directly to your website. Having many direct links tells search engines that your site is important. Take advantage of what you already have and use your social media for SEO by easily gaining a few direct links.

Dominate the SERPs

SERPs is a shorthand way to say “search engine results page.” Dominate the SERPs by filling up the results page with things you control, like your social media profiles. Be an active participant on your social media outlets so your presence grows there. Search engines recognize that activity and will show your profiles on the results page alongside your actual website. That means keeping your profiles robust and actively participating on each platform. Once you start dominating the SERPs, your business is more likely to be seen by people searching for your services.

Create brand awareness with social media

As a business owner, you want people to be very aware of who your company is. You can build brand awareness using your company’s social media platforms, keeping a couple of things in mind.

First, keep your message consistent. An inconsistent message can lead people away: they’ll question your integrity and you’ll lose their trust. A consistent message across all of your social media makes it more likely you’ll build and maintain a healthy following, and increase your bottom line. When your message is consistent, put links on your website that connect to your social media platforms.

Second, think about how brand awareness spreads. People are more likely to share content that makes them look good, so instead of self-promoting updates, lean on educational updates instead. People look good when they share your educational content, and your brand gets seen through those shares, a more natural path to credibility than self-promotion alone.

Use social media to drive traffic and second-order links

Drive traffic to your website and services by using social media. On Twitter, for example, you can tweet direct links to content on your website. You can also gain traffic by tweeting direct links to someone else’s content that links back to your site. Either way, traffic is likely coming to your site.

Traffic that comes directly through a link to your content is called first-tier link building. Traffic that comes indirectly, through promoting someone else’s article that links to your site, is called second-order link building.

It also helps to lay out your tweets so they stand out: introduce the link with some text, place the link, then add a bit more text after it. If you want, add a hashtag, reference, or “via” at the very end. Something like:

Check out this cool article, [link], more words about it here #hashtagheremaybe via @duenorthseo

Use social media as a source of content for your website

Your social media profiles can be a source, both direct and inspirational, of content for your website. It can be a source of direct content when you take something you created on social media, or something you liked there, and rebuild it into a blog post. It can also spark inspiration: maybe you have an interesting conversation going on Twitter that you re-leverage into a blog post. All of this matters for SEO because fresh content lets search engines know you’re an active, living business, not static.

That covers the core ways to use social media to strengthen your SEO. Take some steps today, and put the resources you already have, your social profiles, to work.