How Social Media Affects SEO & Vice Versa
Learn how social media affects SEO from Denver digital marketing experts
If you hang out around social media very long, you start realizing that social media can help you drive more traffic to your website. And, when you start digging into SEO, you start to realize that the whole point of SEO is to drive more traffic organically to your site and help build your online authority with the main search engines. There are a TON of ways social media and SEO can work together to support each other and we’ve polled our local digital friends for their insights as well as a few digital friends from around the world.
We asked them how social media and SEO can work together. Some are SEO experts who have a very technical background. Others are content experts and social media experts. We think you’ll enjoy their insights:
- Seo and social are independent techniques that are closely related. Keywords used are everything in both. However never lose sight of your reader. Just because keywords are important, you still need to talk and relate like a real human. (Lisa Haas, Actuate Social)
- Hashtags are a great resource on social media and can give you clues to top keywords or phrases to consider for SEO keyword strategy. (Andrea Vahl)
- Google doesn’t necessarily see social networks as a competing site. Therefore publishing articles on Facebook and LinkedIn won’t be seen as duplicate content. In fact, publishing on these sites gives you more exposure to your content and more ways to point back to your own website! (Jacob Hagemeyer, JEMSU)
- Keep your content simple. Using industry jargon, buzzwords, and acronyms without explanation will kill your reader’s interest. Try to get in the audience’s way of saying something. It will help your SEO strategy, social media headlines, and email subject lines. Oh, and bonus tip: we’ve been seeing longer content (at least 1000 words) perform better than shorter content like 500 word blog posts. (Jon Cook, Keynote Content)
- Each of the social platforms are their own search engines so there really isn’t one that boosts your content in Google, except for Google + because they utilize each other. If you take the time to build a robust profile in the platforms of your target audience, then SEO, website activity and social media will marry nicely together as a well-oiled machine. (Hollie Clere, Social Media Advisor)
- Regardless of how you drive traffic, whether that’s with SEO, social media, or other tactics, make sure you are measuring the website traffic. You’ll never know what’s working or not if you aren’t measuring it. Google analytics is a great place to start, but there are other tools to track your traffic and understand what marketing tactics are working best. (Jesse Morris, Never Ever Ordinary Business Intelligence.)
- Google seems to cater to user-friendly language, which means marketers need to learn to write the way people actually talk. Record audio or video to create your content, then get it transcribed. Transcription is only $1 per minute on Rev.com and the turnaround time is very fast. (Peter Brissette, Digital Marketing Dude)
- Google is still king when it comes to search! While Google+ doesn’t have the engagement and users that other platforms has, it still has great value to help your brand recognition within the Google world. Hashtags work surprisingly well on Google+ posts too! (Aimee Skillin, Social Media Languages)
- YouTube videos can help your SEO strategy. Optimizing your YouTube video title with SEO can easily increase your views. The video title is the most important piece of text content when it comes to getting YouTube views. Know as YouTube metadata, the title trumps all. The easiest and most effective way to rank videos in YouTube is to focus on relevancy. YouTube search actually sorts video results by relevancy and a few other factors including accumulated watch time and audience retention. Thus, by paying attention to exact youtube search terms and using those exact match keyword phrases at your video title, you’ll gain an edge over other videos that have long titles that are not targeting one particular search term. (Brian G Johnson)
- Brands who are successful in social media AND SEO are regularly creating content. Content like videos, graphics, podcasts, and especially blogs are great because they give you something to feed the Google monster, and they also give you something to share on social media that points back to your own site! (Valerie Morris, Tintero Creative)
Remember, social media and SEO tactics both change almost daily. These are all great tips to keep in your back pocket, but don’t trust us… Go try them out yourself and see what tactics help you out. Then, come back over and share with us what worked. We’d venture to guess that you have a few tips and tricks that you’ve learned yourself.
Thank you to all of our local experts who regularly share and collaborate to help make Denver a thriving digital scene!