For more than 20 years, search engine optimisation has been alive and well. Even in the 1990s, brands and websites were using the rudimentary origins of SEO to outrank their competitors in search results and drive traffic to their pages. As time has passed, the standards for ranking well in search have become much more difficult.
This has led many brands into the world of social media. Through both organic and paid marketing strategies, even the smallest and newest of brands can quickly drive traffic to their websites and landing pages. For many, social media has supplanted SEO as their primary source of traffic.
Despite this, most brands will benefit from pursuing social media marketing and SEO campaigns. To get the most out of each, they need to be in sync with one another. Below, let’s talk about why this is true.
Social Media Can Inform Your SEO Plans
One of the biggest reasons why social media has such value when planning SEO campaigns is the insight it can provide in real-time. With SEO strategy, your content must first be created. After that, it can take weeks or months to know whether or not search engines and search engine visitors alike are finding your content to be amenable to their tastes.
With social media, you can blast out content immediately and begin seeing how well it is received in hours rather than months. This can help give you an idea of whether or not the content in question is sufficient enough to truly power your longer-term SEO strategy.
Social Media Sends (Some) Positive Indicators to Search Engines
Search engines want to rank websites highly that demonstrate credibility and relevance. Building these metrics via SEO can take a long time, but having an ally to speed up the process is easier than you might think.
While traffic directed to your blogs or websites from social media shares will not directly result in higher rankings, they can help by pinging favourable metrics to search engines. Some of these metrics include lower bounce rates, higher engagement rates and a higher average on-page time. All of these metrics help paint a broader picture of your website as being reliable, relevant and interesting to audiences.
Social Media Posts Can Rank in Search Results
The primary goal of building out your SEO clout is to rank higher in select search engine results pages. Did you know that social media provides a de-facto way to achieve that goal without a plethora of difficult work?
Posts that are made on platforms such as Twitter and Google Plus can in fact appear in search results; in many cases, these social media links are among the first results listed in a SERP. With Google and other search engines revising their algorithms to more heavily feature social media content back in 2015, brands that consistently use social media have a much greater chance of being featured. This can drive traffic to your social media platforms and/or your website, accomplishing exactly what you wanted to do via SEO in the first place.
For those planning strategies to enhance their social media and search engine optimisation strategies, combining efforts often makes sense. With social media providing genuine benefits to SEO and vice-versa, incorporating the two into a broader marketing plan will ensure any brand gets maximum value from their efforts.
