Kick your SEO strategy up a notch or two by incorporating these 4 social media must-haves.
Social media may not be the end-all be-all SEO strategy that media hype made it out to be, but that doesn’t make it any less important. In fact, social media is becoming increasingly more prevalent as a ranking signal and maybe what brands need to get a one-up on their SEO strategy. Here are 4 ways you can leverage social media to spice up your SEO efforts.
- Add social media share buttons – The term ‘social media buttons’ is frequently used interchangeably, when really, there are two distinct types of buttons that need to be recognized. There are ‘social icons’, which simply link to the brand’s social media channels and there are ‘share buttons’ which share the page’s content. While traditional social media icons are great for creating awareness around the existence of your social media channels, the social media share buttons are what help to pass possible SEO authority. Incorporate social media share buttons onto every page of your website, as well as on content that you create.
- Blog – Blogging is a great tool for any business. It can promote thought-leadership, awareness, and traffic, not to mention, it can give brands more opportunities to rank in organic search. While the benefits of SEO for blogs are vast, the most notable are backlinks and increased site crawlable, both of which can help brands with their rankings. To get the most out of your blogs, do your research on your audience and their searches. Leverage headlines, title tags and content to incorporate keywords that reflect your research; and above all, create content that is of interest and value to your target audience. Focusing on quality helps to promote more quality traffic and links. Since creating great content is only half the battle, it is also important to focus on distribution and sharing. Incorporate the social share buttons that we talked about above to each blog article to promote sharing and don’t forget to distribute it through your social media channels and online forums to promote further reach.
- Leverage Google+ – Google+ is a great asset for brands on a few different levels. First, there’s Google+ Local, which is essentially a local listing with some social flair. Google+ Local is a great tool for any brand with a local address and can help boost local SEO rankings. Setting up a Google+ Local listing is fairly effortless, and if you’d like to set one up for your brand you can find more information here. Second, the rel=”author” and rel=”publisher” tags are simple code snippets which can help promote authority for authors and brands, respectively. In order to utilize the tags, however, you must first have a Google+ profile (rel=”author”) or a Google+ business page (rel=”publisher”) set up and some general knowledge of .html. You can use either or both tags on any one site. As long as they are utilized correctly, these tags are minor updates that can have a significant impact.
- Review Websites – Reviews can go a long way. Not only can reviews influence buying decisions, but they can possibly help your search rankings as well. However, review sites like Yelp can be a double-edged sword. Review sites tend to rank fairly well for brand queries, and if your reviews are less than par, this could actually hurt you. If your reviews are awesome, then a high ranking for your review sites is a good thing. Promote positive reviews by asking happy customers to review you and if any negative reviews do arise, be proactive about commenting back and amending the situation.
Since social media is becoming predominantly more important as a ranking signal, it may just be that boost you need to send your SEO efforts over the top. More importantly, if you are not invested in your social media presence in the years to come you could be at a disadvantage. Taking the time to do it now will not only help give you a boost today but will keep you from playing catch-up tomorrow.
If you have any questions about social media SEO strategy and its impact on your overall SEO strategy, or how to begin leveraging social media, contact us below for a free assessment.
Submitted by Erica Machin, Titan Growth