Social Media And SEO Strategy Social media has changed the very landscape of the internet. Everyone involved in SEO should understand this and embrace it fully. These two go hand in hand, complementing each other. To have a successful strategy you need to master both and then blend them together in perfect harmony.   Why Keyword Research Is Perhaps Even More Important Than Ever Social media has the capability to make posts, blogs or videos go viral in minutes. Before it was as prevalent as it is today, people used to concentrate on writing excellent articles which were keyword rich. The idea was to try and predict the exact phrases that people would search for and then write an article around those phrases. This concept still holds weight and, if you can combine it with the power of social media, it can really take you places. By creatively choosing the best phrases, using clever hashtags, and of course writing excellent content, your posts are much more likely to generate interest and you are one step closer to that all-important viral post.   Come Up With A Clever Marketing Idea To Encourage People To Share Your Content With millions of new pages being created on a daily basis, it can be a challenge to gain exposure for your post. Sometimes it can be beneficial to give your site a little marketing boost. This can be achieved by running a competition or giving away some merchandise. Companies encouraging people to follow them and retweet a certain saying is a common tactic on Twitter, especially in healthcare marketing. Of course, they include the hashtag of the promotion. This has two significant benefits. Firstly, your hashtag and links are gaining significant publicity, which will create backlinks and hopefully direct traffic to your site. The other benefit is that you will be growing your follower numbers on your Twitter account. There is no guarantee that your new followers will stay with you once the competition is over. However, that is your challenge to solve. Provided you interact with your new followers, and continue to provide value in your tweets, you should be able to retain the majority of your new adherents. In essence one of your aims is to develop a tribe of people who are passionate about your subject matter. Ideally, they should actually look forward to the tweets you post. The quality of your followers is very important. Don’t ever try to game the system by buying fake followers. Google can detect this and may well penalize you in the long-term.   Increase Your External Inbound Links Generating external links to your website has always been an important facet of SEO, albeit a difficult one to achieve. This is one of social media’s strengths, as it encourages external sites to link to your content. These links are also likely to be from quite a wide variety of different sites; the more diversity your external links have, the better they are in Google’s eyes. Provided you have excellent content that people want to read, social media can be used as the broadcast tool to get the word out there. The other benefit of using this strategy is that you will begin to establish authority status on social media as well, giving you another area to build and grow.   The Importance Of Local Marketing Perhaps your website or business is more concerned with local matters rather than world domination. Drill down on Twitter and other forms of social media and try to find local events or other complimentary local businesses to interact with. If you attend a local show or event, take and share photos, write a blog post and appeal to other local people to comment or engage. Not only will this embed you deeply within the community, but it will also make you more visible in local searches. It is hard to overestimate the Importance of local SEO. So many companies focus on the bigger picture, but by really focusing in on your neighborhood, you can quickly generate lots of traffic and positive ranking signals. This post will give you some further ideas about the benefits of social media to your SEO Strategy.   About the author: Guy Sheetrit is the founder of Over The Top SEO, one of the fastest growing and most awarded multinational SEO agencies in the world. He generated his clients over 16 million leads, making their phones ring over 5 million times, and passing the $1 billion dollar mark in 2019.