What You Need to Know

  • 81% of marketers have integrated social media to increase the “discoverability” of their websites online (source)
  • Link-building, one of the most important SEO factors, is driven primarily by mastering social media networks
  • Your social profiles can actually rank in search engines! This gives you another way to be discovered by potential customers
  • Facebook gets 1 billion queries per day. Many of these searches are for local businesses (source)

Social media, SEO, and online marketing are so tightly interwoven these days, that it’s hard to tell the difference between them. Businesses now more than ever are using the web’s most popular networks to find, engage, and interact with their customer base.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of confusion about social media and SEO, and small businesses might be deterred by tough competition, lack of knowledge, or inability to measure success. To show you how powerful social and SEO can be for your business, we’ve compiled three strategies that will instantly boost your rankings and drive more traffic to your site.

Fast Fact: According to Hubspot, 80% of marketers said social media increased their web traffic!

 

Grow Your Organic Followers

The more followers, friends, etc., that you have, the better chance you have of ranking, engaging, and converting. But it can’t be just any followers. Buying low-quality friends or having fake profiles following you is actually detrimental to your efforts (exceptions apply).

Growing your following organically is a mixture of a few factors; namely:

  • Sharing quality content regularly – This gives Google fresh keywords to rank you for and readers more digestible content to check out and interact with.
  • Optimizing your pages for SEO – Location keywords, geo information, high-volume keywords, and more all contribute to how easy it is to find you.
  • Focusing on the right networks – The most successful companies stick to what works. Discover which networks suit you best and focus on them. Are you B2B? Then Linkedin is best. Are you a restaurant, fashion designer, or travel company? Then you might want Pinterest or Instagram.

Encourage Links

If Google’s results were an election, then links would be the votes. A link to your site is like a person or company “voting” for you and saying “this website is relevant for a certain search term”. Google weighs this heavily into its rankings.

Use social media as a platform for encouraging links. This is achieved via your content, posts, and social media personality (more on that next!). Tactics that work are:

  • Using hashtags to increase visibility
  • Interacting with users and generating conversation
  • Participating in industry discussions and suggesting your own content
  • Producing content that is useful to readers (and optimized for the right keywords)

 

Having a unique personality

Engaging your following regularly with a unique persona is key to generating buzz and familiarity. You will encounter regular fans, past customers, discount hunters, and curious new leads, and they need to know what to expect. A regular persona puts a “face” to your business. Delivering your brand’s experience through a persona creates a connection that facilitates a visitor’s journey through the sales funnel!

Social media is a powerful tool for small businesses to improve their rankings, generate new leads, and grow their businesses online, and these three tips will help your company instantly. No matter the competition, anyone can grow their company online with the right strategies. If you’re ready to take your business to the next level, talk to BlueHat Marketing’s team of social media SEO experts today.