How to Use Social Media to Improve Search Ranks

Campaigns, engagement, social trust, contests, leads, and all things exciting- that’s social media. However, that’s not all! The big industry giants don’t just stress on your social presence because of customer engagement, there’s more to it.

Also Read: What Are The Most Necessary Traits That Your Social Media Database Should Possess?

Search Ranks.

SEO and social media are not two different worlds. See them as siblings of a single parent-Internet! They are interconnected with an interesting bond. For you to take advantage of this bond for your good, you have got to untie the threads and understand this connection.

Let’s fathom this connection and understand how we can use Social Media to improve Search Ranks.

The Connection

Search engines and their algorithms are a mystery. All we can do is predict and guess. It’s not yet clear as to how the search engines use social media to give your website a suitable rank. However, trying to untie the knot, let’s try to understand it from the user perspective. You follow a company page. The page is very active. You place your trust on the social page by following it and engaging with its content. Now, there are a lot of people like you who place the same trust in varying degrees on that page. If there are so many people following a page, there must be something about it, its content, and consequently, its services. Directly or indirectly, it gives a signal of influential user behavior on the page impacting the existence of the website. Consider it like ORM, for a moment. More positive reviews, better the ranking. More is the engagement; better is the ranking.

It’s not as direct as it seems to be. The algorithms are complex. Whatever be the case, the gist remains the same- Social media is a powerful SEO tool.

Implementing a Social Strategy

Your strategy’s prime focus should be getting as many clicks as possible. Sounds desperate? It definitely does, but that’s the bare truth. You need clicks.  However, it should not look desperate to the audience, no matter how desperate it seems to you. More clicks lead to more signals indicating that you are offering something worthy of users’ time. Let’s go ahead and talk about the minute details you need to look into in order to create a strategy that attracts clicks.

Also Read: Powerful Social Media Marketing Strategy For Better Brand Promotion

1. Short and succinct copy

This has been said a lot of times, and you will still see a lot of social posts that carry more words than required.  You need no more than 10- 200 characters to make your point clear. Condense your message and make it as short as possible. Posts with less content are more likely to attract a larger audience resulting in more clicks. Not just the caption, the title, the description and the overall look of your post shall have the shortest possible content.

2. Suggest the reaction you expect

Think of relationships. Unspoken expectations are never understood. The concept applies to the relationship between you and your customers as well. Be clear and suggest what you expect your users to do. A “retweet,” “follow,” “check out,” “like,” “pin,” etc.

See how Discovery makes it effortlessly clear what it expects its audience to do.

3. Why should someone click?

Would you click on a link that does not give you a reason to click? Probably yes if you are simply trying to kill time. However, that does not happen very frequently in the real world. A reason to click involves a help. Something that seems to help the user is bound to get a considerable number of clicks. Pick a pain point that you are giving a solution to and make it very clear in your copy. Wait and see the clicks flowing in!

See how Hub Spot does it. It might not attract engagement, but it will definitely attract clicks.

4. Get discovered through keyword optimization

Not just your website, your social profiles need keyword optimization as well. Include your keywords in profile bio, links, summaries, post content, etc. to help social platforms identify you with certain keywords. Hashtags are very powerful weapons when it comes to social SEO. Use them well and keep them relevant. The overall idea is to enhance your visibility. Type “social media marketing” on Twitter and see how these two pop up:

5. Put YouTube to good use

This trick is quite direct. Put unique content on your YouTube, and see how it outranks many great websites. Search engines place importance on visual content. A YouTube tutorial on how to make a braid ranks higher than Wikihow.

6. Share posts that get quoted

This is tough but totally doable. Share posts that are so good that people quote them and give them backlinks. See how we have linked Discovery, Hub Spot, and Grammarly. Their posts were worthy of examples that made us link to them. Strive to make your posts different. You can choose to say something groundbreaking about the latest trending events. Or simply tweet something so funny that BuzzFeed includes your tweet in a post like this: “The 85 Funniest Tweets Of All Time.”

Plan ahead

Social media might not be directly related to your SEO, but you never know the future. Who knows the upcoming algorithms? Google’s going to penalize Intrusive Interstitials. It might roll out a new update announcing a direct connection between social media and search rankings. Forget about the future; even now, your social media plays a vital, though indirect, role in improving your search rankings. So, plan ahead for the future and the present, and launch a compelling Social Media Strategy. Need help? Contact us.