6 Social Media Tips to Boost SEO Ranking

While social media signals may or may not be a direct ranking factor to improve search engine ranking. Its influence on better search visibility can never be overlooked or ignored.

Indirectly, social media viral effects can boost the search engine ranking position in SERP. This is because when an article goes viral on the social media platform, it gives it more exposure. With more exposure to your content, there could be more links to the source page from other industry outlets.

And links are the building blocks to a well SEO optimized pages. Without links, relevant ones for that matter, a web page will always struggle to rank better for competitive search terms.

Also, social media signals may not be a direct ranking factor for Google, especially. But social media effect does amplify other ranking factors Google considers for ranking webpages in their search algorithm.

These social media tips or signals are what we’re going to take a look at in this post to see how you can leverage their usefulness to improve your SEO visibility. And hopefully, you’ll learn one or two things to boost your social media marketing and improve your overall search ranking.

1. Social Media Profile Optimization

Optimizing your social media profile pages is one of the most important aspects you shouldn’t overlook. For brands/companies, maintaining a consistent brand logo across all your social media company’s accounts is important for better and quick brand recognition.

And if you’re a solo entrepreneur, make sure to maintain one profile picture of yourself across all your social media account. It helps your followers to quickly and easily recognize you wherever they come across your social shares.

Hint: My Bio picture at the end of this post is used across my social media accounts: Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. Don’t forget to link out from your social media profile pages to your website too.

You can link to your blog homepage or to your most important pages as well. Such pages could be your landing page for collecting leads, contact us page, About me page, etc.

2. Use Paid Marketing

The point here is this.

When you promote your content on social media with paid marketing, you’re likely to reach a more relevant targeted audience. Depending on your marketing goal, you can target industry leaders, beginners, professionals, agencies, all in your audience setup.

This gives your content more exposure it deserves. And possibly, gets into the hands of other experts in your field which can lead to referencing your content in the future to their audience.

Assuming your content is so good enough and worthy of reference. Most of what greatly influences search engine ranking is link signals.

The good thing is that this type of link comes freely without begging, buying or asking for it.

3. Optimize for Bing

In 2014, Google’s former head of search quality team “Matt Cutts” (now with US Digital Services) published a video in which he indicates that social metrics signals, such as social likes and followers do not affect search engine ranking. But that word isn’t to be taking.

This is because Matt Cutts himself once said in a video back in 2010 that Google uses the social signal as one of ‘it’s ranking factors. Well, maybe things have changed over the years going by the search algorithm updates.

But unlike Google, Bing has never been back and forth on its stance on the impact of the social signal on SEO. Bing has always been open about social media signals impact on its search engine ranking.

Here is a statement from the Bing webmaster guidelines page:

Social media plays a role in today’s effort to rank well in search results.  The most obvious part it plays is via influence.  If you are influential socially, this leads to your followers sharing your information widely, which in turn results in Bing seeing these positive signals.  These positive signals can have an impact on how you rank organically in the long run.

Google isn’t the only search engine available. In fact, optimizing for other search engines should be on your priority list. And if you consider that Bing alone was responsible for 33% of US searches in 2018, it makes sense to start optimizing for Bing as well.

4. Share Updates Regularly

Nobody wants to be forgotten.

One of the best ways to get in the minds of your followers regularly is to keep reaching out to them frequently.

If you run an email newsletter campaign and only email your subscribers once in two months or so. There is the possibility your email open rate will below industry average score. Most of your subscribers may not even remember why or when they opt-in to receive your newsletter.

This is the same with social media updates. Post regularly and share interesting fun, educative and entertaining information accompany with eye-catching images.

Though, depending on the social media platform in question. Sharing frequency varies according to each social media platform. Posting 15 to 40 times per day might be a good thing on Twitter, but it will be disastrous to do so on Facebook or Linkedin.

5. Make Social Sharing Easy

Your blog post is not the only place to include your social sharing buttons.

Include them in your email newsletters and if possible in all outgoing promotional messages that go out on behalf of your brand name. This helps to make your content reach more people who you can’t possibly reach on your own.

It could also help in increasing your opt-in rate. At the end of each blog post, kindly ask for social share. Make it easy for your readers to share your content by placing the sharing button in a very visible place on the blog.

6. Be Active

Yes, without being active on social media it could be a daunting task to command the attention of your potential customers.

If you don’t have all the time in this world to promote your content on social media, you can outsource it to freelancers. Not everyone has the time to hang around in these social media places, but their importance to online marketing could not be denied or ignored.

Conclusion

SEO and social media marketing now work together. It is hard to separate the two in our today marketing world if you really want to achieve maximum results from your marketing campaign.

Either social signals influence SEO ranking or not (indirectly or directly), it will do more good than harm to leverage effective social media marketing strategies that work.

These are just six and not in any way a conclusive list of social media tips to boost your SEO efforts. I’ll be glad if you share your experience in the comment box below so we both learn new things that help users make the most informed decision.