Janelle Zacherl
June 8, 2022
No matter what your online goals are, understanding what has an impact on your website’s effectiveness is important for any business. Apart from just producing creative and useful content, putting together a visible website is about gathering and interpreting audience and keyword research. Then, building a prominent social media presence that pulls the eye of potential consumers driven by data and keywords. Website content drives to social media, and social media drives to the website. But how can we optimize this relationship? Learn how SEO and social media can tag team it to drive better digital visibility and performance.
Do likes, shares, and comments matter? Maybe not directly but if they drive traffic to your website or make them a loyal fan down the road, then the effort is most likely worth it. Here’s why:
• Social media provides a medium to interact with your audience directly. Many brands have come up with innovative and humorous ways to answer follower questions and provide customer service with funny quips or GIFs.
• Followers engaging with your brand’s social media could lead to shares, spreading your brand love. With all of the ads flooding social media today, an organic share is golden for brands.
• Shares are a big endorsement of your brand. Consumers are not only saying “hey, I like this” to themselves. They’re putting themselves out there sharing your content with their social group. Reaching out to thank them for sharing is a quality gesture.
“SEO and social media are the one-two punch of marketing, and one tip to use them both is to utilize two-way retargeting” — Andrew Holland, Author and SEO expert
A variety of content is a great thing for a website. But keep track of what is doing well, and what isn’t. Monitoring social media metrics will help to carve a path into what your audience is looking for, what they respond to, and what they aren’t feeling. For example, if you’re posting testimonials, how-to’s, and funny pictures of dogs…and clients are responding to the testimonials, it’s a clue to adjust content, and adjust SEO (a.k.a. keywords) for what is working. SEO works best if you provide information to answer your audience’s questions.
So, what social media posts are leading to your conversions? Because that’s the whole point of all of this work. The content that “leads” to leads should be what informs SEO. While conversions are certainly the top priority, social media can provide information, engagement, and entertainment to feed SEO. Sometimes, as marketers, we think we’re doing a good job and reaching the right people, but social listening tools let us know for sure. Data-driven results not only define your social media strategy, but an SEO strategy that penetrates your market.
Conversely, your website shouldn’t try to communicate something that it isn’t. Maybe on social media, your audience has responded well to the funny pictures of dogs. But if they get to your website and see that it’s a flower shop, that like and click will be irrelevant.
For example, brands like Nike and Adidas partner with athletes in their social media posts. It doesn’t take a genius to understand that these brands sell athletic wear and that aspirational athletes are the perfect brand ambassadors. For some brands, the ideal partnership is not so obvious. The foundation starts with strictly defining purpose and keywords. Do that first.
Allow SEO and keywords to drive content creation on your social channels. Understanding what’s happening on social media can definitely help refine the keywords and what direction your website is heading, but don’t try to provide something that you can’t. If your business doesn’t have a solid digital foundation, it doesn’t need a Facebook account. SEO is the groundwork and social media is the decoration. Build your “house” with that in mind.
Followers can push content direction and give you clues as to what they want. Social community is about interacting with consumers. Listening to their complaints, comments, and suggestions can give some inspiration to the keywords used in SEO or inform social content development. Don’t be afraid to ask for feedback, testimonials, and reviews. Sometimes the best ideas come from a set of fresh eyes.
A great example is Gymshark on TikTok. They leverage user-generated, inspirational content. Their recent #gymshark66 campaign used fitness influencers to get users to join in the challenge and win a membership. This hashtag alone has been viewed over 193 million times. So it’s pretty clear that Gymshark should use a riff on that strategy again in the future. Not every campaign will be a winner, but marketers love quick wins like this campaign.
Don’t be discouraged if the interaction is negative towards your brand. Negative feedback can also be useful to direct your brand personality, social content, or even basic keywords if necessary. The evolution of a brand can have many twists and turns.
Retargeting methods and algorithms can take a ton of research out of SEO work. Building audiences can be the hardest part in the early stages of young businesses. Social media can be used to collect names via forms and users to add to your list who view, follow, and engage with your content or your website.
SEO and social media work together. Google has adamantly denied that social media interactions affect rankings, but they certainly affect things like backlinks and sources. Make sure your brand is up to speed on the latest in social media and SEO to drive better digital results.
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June 8, 2022
