Social media and online communities are not only great for engaging with your audience, but also for boosting your SEO. SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of improving your website's visibility and relevance for organic search results. In this article, you will learn how to use social media and online communities to improve your SEO in six ways.
The first step is to optimize your social media and online community profiles with relevant keywords, descriptions, and links to your website. This will help search engines and users find and recognize your brand, as well as increase your authority and credibility. Make sure your profiles are consistent, complete, and up to date across all platforms.
The first step in anything you do online is optimization. You need to ensure that your branding, information and links are consistent so that crawlers can identify that all of your platforms are one and the same. This also helps direct prospects who are looking for information regarding your brand.
Social media content is often displayed in Google searches, so make sure that you regularly share posts with relevant keywords & insightful industry perspectives (in addition to optimizing your profile). Like this! ;-)
Content Distribution: Share high-quality, shareable content on social media platforms to expand your reach. Encourage engagement through likes, shares, and comments, signaling search engines that your content is valuable. Link Building: Share your content in relevant online communities and forums, adding value to discussions. Engage in link-building activities by sharing your content on social bookmarking sites. Profile Optimization: Optimize your social media profiles with accurate information, including a link to your website. Utilize relevant keywords in your profiles to align with your SEO strategy.
The second step is to share valuable content that attracts and engages your audience, as well as drives traffic to your website. Content can include blog posts, videos, infographics, podcasts, ebooks, webinars, and more. The key is to create content that is relevant, useful, and informative for your target audience, as well as optimized for keywords, titles, tags, and meta descriptions. You can also repurpose and update your existing content to reach new audiences and extend its lifespan.
Great content on your socials is usually a sign that the content on your site is also good. When great content is posted on one platform, that can potentially drive traffic to your website.
Many people feel overwhelmed by the volume of content required across all of the platforms. You can overcome this by batching content, repurposing content across platforms, and even repurposing content on the same platforms (I know many influencers who re-post variations of their highest performing content every 3-4 months)
The third step is to encourage social signals, which are actions that users take on social media and online communities, such as likes, comments, shares, reviews, ratings, and mentions. Social signals can indicate the popularity, quality, and relevance of your content, as well as increase your exposure and reach. To encourage social signals, you can ask questions, run polls, host contests, offer incentives, and respond to feedback.
Do this in a conversational manner or as a natural call-to-action to make it feel less forced. Additionally, spark reciprocity by being an active commenter/engager with others in your industry or associated content creators.
The fourth step is to build relationships and networks with your audience, influencers, and other relevant players in your niche. Relationships and networks can help you gain trust, loyalty, and advocacy from your audience, as well as access to new opportunities, resources, and audiences. To build relationships and networks, you can join and participate in online communities, groups, forums, and chats, as well as collaborate, co-create, and cross-promote with others.
Facebook groups in particular are a wonderful way to engage your audience. If you create and play host a group, you have naturally positioned yourself as the leader to the members you invite.
The fifth step is to generate backlinks, which are links from other websites to your website. Backlinks can signal the authority, credibility, and relevance of your website, as well as increase your traffic and ranking. To generate backlinks, you can create and share high-quality content that others want to link to, as well as reach out to relevant websites, blogs, media outlets, and influencers for guest posting, interviews, reviews, and testimonials.
Backlinks are the most powerful way to bring authority to your site. Collaborate with other authors, get featured in other sites and make sure you're constantly networking to build that backlink profile for your website.
Links in social media posts can be one the best type of backlinks for driving quality traffic to your website. Clicks on these links are coming from users who find enough value in the message that they want to explore more about your brand, so make sure the web page being linked is highly relevant to the social content you've shared.
The sixth and final step is to measure and improve your social media and online community efforts for SEO. You can use various tools and metrics to track and analyze your performance, such as traffic, engagement, conversions, ranking, and ROI. You can also use feedback and insights to identify and address your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. By measuring and improving, you can optimize your strategy and achieve your goals.
In my experience, being able to measure the impact of key competitors' SEO against my brand, or a client's brand, adds significant insights into improving the planning of SEO strategy. If you have the budget, there are tools that can help you do this so that you're able to pull data insights about your rival's backlinks, domain authority of linking websites, and more.