SEO and Social Media: Helping each other with Traffic

January 14th, 2020

Your website is bursting with quality content created specifically for your target audience. Search engines know it exists and show it in the search results. You also have it registered in the local popular website catalog. So, what now?

Your SEO journey is not over just yet. Now comes the time when you should knuckle down, promote your website and grow your audience. You can rely purely on paid advertisements or you can combine these efforts with social media. While being active on social sites does not directly influence the position of your website in search results, it helps you reach more of the right people, gain more visibility and get more backlinks. In return, your site can rank higher.

Social sites

The most popular social networks at this moment include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest.

Each of these platforms plays a significant role in connecting people, sharing content, and building communities. For instance, growing your Instagram followers can enhance your brand visibility and engagement, making it a key aspect of your social media strategy.

Tip: Working with a social media content creation agency can help craft tailored content for your audience, ensuring your brand resonates well with these communities.

All these social sites connect people and create communities joined together by similar interests and opinions. Most of us belong to at least one of them and so does at least part of your audience.

Each of them serves a different purpose and therefore needs a different type of content. You wouldn’t post a picture of your cat on your LinkedIn business account, no matter how cute it is, right? Pick only those social sites where it makes sense for you to be active. Your company doesn’t have to be everywhere.

In fact, some businesses don’t need to be on social networks. Maybe your target audience doesn’t use them at all. Maybe you’re a B2B business that relies on other forms of communication to attract potential clients. You might also keep a social account solely to provide additional customer service and never share a single post. Consider if your audience is using social media, which ones exactly and if you can devote enough time and effort to regularly come up with good social content.

What to share when you want to share

It helps to have a clear vision of your brand. What are the core values of your company, what do you care about and what is your communication style? Be authentic and keep it similar across all your accounts. Instead of posting highly stylized photos from photo banks, share behind-the-scenes photos of what’s going on inside your company. Repost content from other social media users, if you think your audience would like to see it. If you have a blog, you also have a steady source of fresh social content, since all your articles should make an appearance on social networks to increase their reach.

If you have followed the advice from our article on where to begin with SEO, you have surely spent hours researching your target audience. Now you can use all that data to prepare your social content. What would the right people like to see on your social networks?

Unfortunately, even if your audience is active on social media, they mostly use them to check up on their families and friends, to share their interests with like-minded people or to find solutions for some issues. They usually have very little desire to see what companies are doing, unless it falls under one of these criteria:

It’s beneficial for them or helps them solve their issue
It makes them laugh or triggers positive emotions
It allows them to express their opinion on a topic they deeply care about
It can help a good cause without much effort

Whenever you create a new post, think about your audience and what reaction you can expect to get from them.

Active communication

We have some bad news for all the shy introverts – very few people are going to find your website or social profiles on their own. Eventually, you will have to leave the security of your account, seek out new friends and clients and strike up conversations with strangers. You can keep it simple. Join relevant Facebook groups and interact with other members, search for related hashtags, follow and engage with people within the same niche and participate in discussions. Build relationships.

Social networks and your website

Finally, don’t forget about integrating social media into your website. Interlink all your social accounts with your website. Also add a specialized social widget or social network buttons, which allow visitors to directly share content from your website on their social accounts.

Other forms of promotion

Since you already started working on the promotion of your website, you might also consider incorporating these two additional ideas into your promotion plan.

Reviews posted on popular websites and social accounts – even if the other website owners and influencers are not lining up on their own to sing praises about your business just yet, you can proactively ask them to post an honest review of your services or products on their website. They will usually do it in exchange for a similar favor, money or even the product they reviewed.

Newsletters – add a simple subscription form to your website so visitors can sign up for a newsletter. Once you have their approval, you can regularly send out news and marketing updates, effectively reminding them about your business.

All in all, managing social networks, approaching new people and taking care of all the forms of promotion requires a lot of additional work, but the benefits for your business might be worth the extra effort.

Want to know how to do SEO? We have a detailed guide for you.

How do you feel about social networks? Are you using them for promotion? Let us know in the comments below.