Keeping your social media accounts up-to-date is crucial when working to increase awareness of your company. Although certain channels may be more useful to specific industries, it is always important to keep things current and continue posting across all your business’ accounts. For our agency, we find focusing on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+ to be the most beneficial. Today, I will discuss how to look at social media marketing in relation to search engine optimization (SEO).
Update Your Site and Social Media with Fresh Content
A key component to SEO is content. Having quality content that targets key terms is a great way to help search engines rank your pages. However, once you feel you have exhausted the amount of content and key words you can add to your static pages, it can be challenging to find ways to increase on-page copy and key term usage.
At Hall, one way our team creates updated and fresh content is through maintaining our blog. We produce weekly blog posts on current trends, new insights, and industry news. These blog posts increase content about trending topics and our viewpoints on new industry specific tools and programs. However, publishing blog posts only on your company’s website limits the reach of the post. Blog posts are a great piece of content that can be distributed to reach a wider audience. We distribute our blog posts on Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn. This helps to reach an audience that may follow us on their social media account but who may not regularly be checking the blog on our website. This helps drive traffic to our website through either linking the blog post or encouraging users to search for our company to learn more about the topics we are discussing.
Bringing this back to SEO, creating new content is a great way to target high traffic key terms that users are searching for. By adding these key terms in content and continually adding new content on your site, you can work to increase your rank for that term.
Create Engaging Content
When using social media, it is important to know your audience and what content they want to read. For our purposes, we post about our company culture, blogs, press releases, and insights on relevant articles. By monitoring our posts, we can see which style of posts have the highest engagement, which social media channels have the highest impressions on our posts, and we can track which channels drive the largest amount of traffic to our site.
This can help gauge what content users like to see and where possible opportunity lies to increase key terms and content that work for your SEO strategy. For example, if users are engaging in blog posts about WordPress or team articles about new AdWords features, we can choose to focus upcoming posts on these topics. If users are frequently retweeting industry news posts or liking company culture Facebook posts, ramping up those channels is an efficient way to increase presence.
Creating engaging content can be difficult. It is important to monitor your channels to make sure your posting is efficient and targeting the correct audience. Although we choose to focus our content on the specified topics, it is important to remember to post content that your audience is looking to engage in.
Improve Industry Presence
To increase presence in your industry, it is important to display that you are well-informed on the latest trends. We like to provide insight into our take on relevant news articles by posting a brief update on our thoughts and how we will use the new information. Whether it is a new software we are excited to use or a way we are combating a relevant industry challenge, we provide information on trending topics. You can also reach out to users unfamiliar to your brand who are searching for the ‘new’ news may stumble across your company through the addition of trending hashtags to posts and placing yourself into the broader, current conversation. However, this can be done in any form that fits your industry whether it be hashtags or other forms of reaching out to other industry peers.
By staying current on the latest industry trends, we work on our SEO to ensure that we are complying with current standards. By knowing the upcoming changes and new releases coming out, we can create a SEO plan to make sure our company website is targeting the right terms and specified changes.
Establishing a presence on these channels also displays that you are an industry leader. This not only helps drive traffic at the time but may influence users to return to your website for future business. If you are engaging in these social media habits, you want to make sure that your website has updated SEO so users find your website when searching for your company.
Search Engine Optimization and Social Media
As you can see, search engine optimization and social media overlap for several reasons; adding content, creating engaging material, and improving industry presence displays the interplay of the two fields. I touched on the methods our company uses to post on social media channels and the style of posts we use. Before you begin ramping up your social media presence, pick your channels based on your industry, find specific post types you will use, and begin creating new, engaging, industry-specific content.
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