What is Social SEO?

Social media marketing (SMM) isn’t unheard of. On its own, it is a useful channel for increasing visibility to a wider audience, interacting with customers, and strengthening your brand.

According to Social Media Examiner (2017), 96 percent of small and medium businesses have admitted to using social media in their marketing strategy. So if you have in any way used social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter for business, then you’re doing SMM. The power of social media is no secret either. Vendasta (2017) says it helped 90 percent of marketers with better exposure, and 75 percent with increased traffic.

Now imagine combining social media marketing with traditional strategies in search engine optimization. What you get is social SEO. However, it’s not as simple as it looks.

With social SEO, you don’t just use social media to support your SEO efforts. Rather, you’re going to use social media itself as a tool for improving your search engine rankings, together with the best practices in SEO.

Why not stick to SEO as we know it?

It’s true that you can boost your position on search engine results pages (SERPs) with SEO alone. Furthermore, it’s worth mentioning that SMM has no bearing on your rankings when used on its own.

So why bother in the first place?

The Benefits of Social SEO

One reason why social SEO should be the new standard, is that it does have an effect on your rankings. The combined power of social media and search engine optimization allow you to climb up the ranks faster.

How?

The secret is in the links.

Whenever you share content on social media platforms where backlinking is possible – think Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIN, and Pinterest – you are essentially building links to your website. The links and social media content have no SEO value, but the social interaction that happens around them do.

Social signals such as Likes, Shares, and Retweets give search engines an idea of your site’s credibility, as well as a better understanding of the keywords you’re targeting. Both can indirectly improve your site’s SERP position.

If you want to increase your rankings through social SEO, you should:

Create content relevant content so your readers would want to share it
Make it easy for readers to share content from your website to social media
Set up accounts on various social media platforms
Use social media to share content and interact with audiences

Another benefit of social SEO is that it increases your online visibility. Sure, it won’t be able to rank your website (directly, at least). But do you know what else it can rank? Your social media accounts.

Social SEO allows your business to take over more than one spot on the SERPs, thus increasing your visibility. If you’ve done SEO just as well on your social media profiles, you can fill several spots on the top 10 results!

Even if you don’t make it to the top search results, having your business on various social media platforms will already increase your visibility. Each platform has a search engine of its own, which you can use to target keywords and reach old and new audiences alike.

What is Social SEO?