Social Media Marketing
Social Media can significantly improve your SEO efforts and can ensure your website is getting the optimal amount of traffic to it. Social media promotions can include any mention of your site, brand or product through Facebook shares, likes or tweets on Twitter and other related sites. Simplest way to put it, the more engaged your audience is on social media platforms the better your results are for SEO. All the major search engines have now started to show the value of social signals, making social marketing an integral part of your overall website marketing plan.
How Social Marketing Helps to Better Your Organic Rankings
Your site authority is now based on another important factor, your reputation. The only viable source for a company’s reputation are social media outlets that engage real people in sharing things that they like or dislike. Search engines are always looking to display the best possible results to their searchers. So why wouldn’t they show a site that is being most talked about by real people first? They would and they are. It would be silly to overlook this aspect of marketing your website.
What Major Platforms Should You Focus On to Impact Your Site Authority on Search Engines?
Google+ Circles – Although people have experienced several challenges with Google’s algorithm updates in the past couple of years, having a Google+ account and using Google’s other platforms like local search or You Tube will help bring about more attention to your website. The reason being is because when you use Google’s platforms to create accounts and represent your sites, you are promoting them. And as you promote them they would obviously want to show their own platforms above anyone else.
Facebook Shares and Likes – If your Facebook followers get engaged on your Facebook page via your content, giving you likes and making comments rather than ignoring your posts, it gets noticed and shows your site is worthy to list in the search results.
Twitter Followers and Mentions – Twitter is a great platform to reach your audience and get them engaged in your content. Remember that content can be any number of things, like an article, pictures or videos. The key here is engagement. The more you get your followers to engage in your content the more social signals you give off, the more relevant your site becomes to search engines.
Other Social Signals That Increase Rankings Indirectly
Examples of these are positive reviews made on directory sites like Google Local, Yellow pages, and Yelp. Creating accounts on such high authority sites and getting people to place reviews on them tells the search engines that your business deserves more attention. The number of reviews and the type (positive or negative) of reviews left directly influence your SEO on local search. The other benefit of local profiles and reviews is you get to directly engage your customers which in turn builds customer loyalty.
Getting inbound links to your local social networks are another great way to boost your SEO efforts. Why limit to building links only to your site, get the search engines attention by building the links to your social pages as well.
Practical Applications on How to Improve Your Social Signals
Updating your sites content and posting it to your social networks is a great way to make sure you have some customer engagement. This way you are making sure that your customers have something to talk about. Update your social profiles, but don’t post on all social profiles, only ones that pertain to your specific business. Ask people to share your content, or like it. If you don’t ask most people will forget to do so. So make sure you have the ability to get in their face and give them the ability to get engaged with your content.
Using the methods above will increase your search rankings and build your social and brand credibility. It’s almost like getting a 2 for 1 deal.
Share your experiences with social media and how it has helped enhance your SEO and brand identity.