If you\'re looking for an effective way to give your inbound traffic a boost, you\'re going to want to develop a social media SEO strategy.

Why?

Because everyone is on social media. Instagram alone has over one billion active users.

Moreover, in the past year alone, consumer behavior studies have shown that approximately 57% of all social media users will follow a brand to learn more about their products and services and 47% will continue to follow to stay in the loop with updates.

Moreover, roughly 91% of all users end up visiting the brand\'s main website-and 89% make a purchase.

So, how do you incorporate social media into your SEO strategy to increase your website traffic, search rankings, and bottom line?

Keep reading to find out.

The Social Media SEO Strategy Relationship

Social media and search engine optimization have a complicated relationship. While social media doesn\'t directly affect your SEO rankings, it does increase your brand exposure by enabling you to have a more extensive reach into your audience.

There are several ways in which this reach can indirectly influence your website\'s SEO for the better, including:

●      A wider radius for content distribution

●      A longer life cycle of each post

●      Increased online visibility, which equates to more organic traffic

●      Better brand recognition

●      Increased sharing and engagement among your audience

●      A boost for your local SEO

This influence works when users are sharing your content throughout the various social media channels and it creates social signals. Social signals are a collection of your website\'s post shares, likes, and overall online visibility.

These signals are picked up by search engines. Therefore, each social activity involving your website contributes to your organic search rankings. So, the more users that share your content, the more valuable you become in the eyes of Google.

When planned and executed correctly, social media has great potential for driving a ton of traffic to your website. The key is to create high-quality content that offers value to your audience so they\'ll want to share your content with the rest of their friends and followers.

How to Incorporate Social Media Into Your SEO Efforts

One thing to keep in mind is that both social media and search engine optimization have the same goal: Increase website traffic to increase your bottom line.

Therefore, it\'s important to leverage both your social media channels and SEO efforts towards this main goal. However, it can get a little tricky since social media acts as an indirect influence rather than having a direct effect.

So, how do you go about incorporating social media into your SEO efforts effectively? You can start with the following essential tips.

Get Everyone on the Same Page

The very first thing you need to do is get your content marketing and social media strategy teams on the same page to align your content and messaging on all platforms.

First, your teams need to ensure that your target audience will receive your one specific message. This message should echo throughout your website, advertisements, emails, and social media content. Those who don\'t yet recognize your brand will recognize your message.

Second, the content being posted on your social media channels should be utilizing the keywords that you\'re trying to rank for on your website. Google may not crawl Facebook or Instagram, but it does rank social profiles in the search engine result pages (SERPs).

Optimize Your Social Media Accounts

Expanding on social media and the SERPs and the fact that Google doesn\'t crawl social media content, it\'s important to understand what Google does look for.

For example, if you enter certain businesses into Google\'s search query, it\'ll likely pull up the previously mentioned social profile pages from various social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn.

So, how to optimize your social media accounts to make them Google-worthy?

Aside from using the keywords you want to rank for, you need to ensure that your social media profiles include a high-quality profile image, your brand name, relevant information about your brand, hashtags, and a direct link to your landing page.

Curate Excellent Content

We cannot stress this enough: Content is king.

Your social media accounts are another way to showcase who you are as a brand and what you have to offer. It\'s also another way to demonstrate that you\'re an expert within your industry and therefore an authoritative source that can be trusted.

So, you want to curate content that:

●      Demonstrates your knowledge and experience within your industry

●      Resonates with your audience\'s pain points

●      Provides valuable information that they can \"take with them\"

●      Is engaging and thought-provoking, ensuring that they\'ll come back for more and share it with their friends and followers

Of course, when it comes to certain social media channels like Instagram or Twitter, you get the opportunity to be formally informal with your content and your audience. In other words, you can use it to show your human side, which will garner even more trust-just don\'t go overboard with the informal part!

Don\'t Forget to Use Images

Images are arguably the most important part of your social media posts. In fact, most social media posts revolve around images, as opposed to images traditionally being used to break up text in a typical blog post.

According to research conducted by HubSpot, Facebook posts that include high-quality images tend to receive 53% more \"likes\" and 104% more comments compared to posts that don\'t include any images at all. Additionally, the posts that contain images also garner approximately 84% more link clicks.

The same goes for Twitter. The tweets that have engaging images tend to receive 89% more favorites, 150% more retweets, and 18% more link clicks.

So, as you\'re curating content among a social media platform, give your images the same energy as the rest of your content. This goes for any infographics you use to make things like graphs and step-by-step demonstrations more palatable.

Encourage Shares and Links

Link-building is the golden bridge between social media optimization and search engine optimization. When we\'re talking about SEO strategy by itself, we encourage link building via garnering high-quality backlinks to your site from a website with impeccable authority.

When highly credible sites backlink to your site, it\'s letting Google know that you\'re a legitimate source and it\'ll rank you higher in the SERPs.

However, more often than not, getting these links can be a serious challenge. Additionally, if you end up with so-so quality backlinks or poor backlinks, it\'ll work against you in the SERPs.

So, if you\'re putting out top-notch content on your social media platforms, it shouldn\'t be too difficult to get your followers to share your content and links. All you have to do is add social share buttons to your web pages, ensuring that each page includes a call-to-action (CTA) so that your visitors can take action by scheduling a demo, consultation, or making a purchase decision.

Get Some Influencer Support

Social media influencers went from kind of irritating to kind of valuable, very quickly.

Many brands employ one or more social media influencers as part of their digital marketing strategies as it gives them an even greater reach towards audiences that they wouldn\'t be able to reach on their own. They also tend to have a greater impact on their own audiences-hence the name influencer.

This means that if your influencer is promoting one of your products on their social media profile, you can almost guarantee that you\'ll be seeing some direct sales to their followers.

There are all kinds of influencers out there, including macro and micro-influencers. The key is finding the right influencer (or influencers) to represent you.

At the very least, if their followers aren\'t buying your products or services, they\'re still getting exposure to your brand and message. They also likely follow you and visit your website to learn more about you, which will send all the right signals to search engines.

Actively Engage with Your Audience

As we mentioned earlier, active engagement among your audience is essential. Of course, you have to actively engage with them as well.

Once again, it\'s about showing your human side in a world of digital robots where customer service is conducted through bot chats and emails. Your audience can use the comment sections of your social media networks to ask specific questions and share their experiences.

What\'s more, is that YOU can answer them and become part of the conversation. This shows that you care about your customer base.

Additionally, this engagement will extend the life cycle of your posts and provide an extra set of reviews from other customers, which can influence more traffic to your website as well as purchase decisions.

Track Your Progress

The details are in the data.

It\'s important to have all your teams continuously track and analyze the performance of your social media content and how it correlates to your SEO. For example, you\'ll want to measure metrics like your click-through rate (CTR) and where those clicks came from to determine what\'s working and what isn\'t.

With the metrics you track, you can keep improving on your strategy for the ultimate social media-SEO concoction to ensure more brand awareness and better SEO ranking.

Incorporating social media into your SEO strategy has become the way to market your brand more effectively. Businesses that don\'t leverage their social media, or barely put any effort into it, miss out on a lot of organic traffic as well as sales.

Need some help with your social media seo strategy? Contact us today to learn more about the services we offer.

About the author: Nimbletoad is a full-service digital marketing agency based in North County San Diego that specializes in website design, SEO, and PPC. Founded in 2008, Nimbletoad’s results-driven marketing strategies enable B2B and B2C organizations to compete at the highest level regionally and nationally.