4 Indispensable Tips to Improve your Social Media SEO 

Social media and SEO are like two peas in a pod. For success, both have to work in harmony.

In this digital age, social media has become more widespread than before. The market leader, Facebook is the first social network to surpass 1 billion registered accounts along with Instagram that ranks 6th with also nearly 1 billion monthly users, as per Statista.

Social media is important for SEO in several ways. It helps in making your SEO activities simple, lucrative, and effective. Both work hand-in-hand to boost your website’s organic traffic through search engines.

The fact is that: Social media doesn’t directly contribute to SEO.

Why is that so?

The links or posts that you share on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest will bring visibility to your brand, which isn’t seen by Google as a ranking signal.

Social media isn’t considered a ranking factor, but it has its own significance. It indirectly helps to increase your page’s ranking.

In a nutshell: Social media platforms have strong social signals that give you the much-needed exposure to improve your chances of performing well in search engines.

Let me share with you 5 ways social media can help your SEO ranking:

• Generate quality links.
• Build a strong audience.
• Boost your branded searches.
• Understand your audience needs.
• Enable to get into local search.

Positioning yourself in the social media world is a daunting task, as the algorithms behind each platform are very complex.

To be precise, there’s no secret sauce to get maximum engagement and conversion rates. Get your hands on some simple yet effective tactics and tools to make your products engaging to your potential audience on Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

I bring you some amazing tactics to help improve your site’s overall SEO ranking. Let’s get started! Before that, make yourself acquainted with this graph.

Most popular social networks worldwide as of July 2020, ranked by number of active users (in millions)

Source: Statista

1. Pinterest

To get the desired result, you should work on keywords research and images.

Focus on:

• Keywords research
• Images

This is one of the most powerful platforms and the third-biggest social network in the United States, followed by Facebook and Instagram.

This platform is used by more than 320 million monthly active users and helps you to optimize your account, contents, shares, etc.

It helps in keyword research using its own search engine. Like Google, it’s crucial to perform keyword research and focus on words and phrases that offer more engagement and traffic.

Although Pinterest keywords are different from the others, users use broader search terms that generate more niche-based results.

While searching for Pinterest keywords, you should use niche-based keywords that bring traffic. Try to include decided keywords in bios, titles, and descriptions to create compelling content.

Shifting our focus to images, Pinterest is all about images. Users pin content to the boards, which allows them to find it constantly.

This means that if re-pinned, the image can make a good impression on the user multiple times. Here, you need to consider components as simple as the colour of your images.

Pro tip: Focus on the quality and optimization of your images just as your keywords.

Make the full use of the Pinterest optimization tool to enhance your Pinterest SEO.

2. Facebook

It might be exciting to browse Facebook, but you should know that Facebook’s algorithm is intricate when you’re talking about SEO. This makes it difficult to get the desired organic traffic.

To expand your business on Facebook, you can boost organic traffic through the following:

Focus on:

• Incentives
• Active user engagement

Incentivization means using offers, products, and services to encourage followers to promote your products or web page. Be generous in posting contests, promotions, giveaways to attract users to your brand.

Disclaimer: Don’t forget to establish guidelines to participate to ensure you reap SEO benefits.

It includes asking users to share the post, tag friends, or follow the page. Make sure you link your website link to force visitors to see your content and products. Whenever participants tag or share your post, you’re bringing free traffic to your website.

Contents and giveaways are a great way to collaborate with your followers and interact with your page.

Engagement is essential in driving organic traffic to your business. It helps in improving your brand value, reputation, and enhances content visibility.

Try to reply to your audience to drive new activity to the post and make it visible to all your followers.

Using social media management and optimization system tools, monitor and analyze data from Facebook mentions and tags to create engaging content.

3. Instagram

You might be knowing that Google doesn’t index Instagram posts like Facebook and Pinterest. All the keywords used within the photo captions and alt text don’t come within search engine results. The fact is that Google only indexes Instagram accounts. Thus, it’s advisable to add organic keywords in your bio and account name.

Focus on:

• Hashtags

Yes, the best way to bring in organic traffic is to use creative, relevant, and quality hashtags. Instagram is similar to a search engine as it allows users to search for keywords and phrases with hashtags.

Before creating your hashtag, do thorough research on hashtags that are relevant and produce high user engagement.

Once you’ve mastered this art, throw as many as hashtags in your Instagram stories and captions. Also, choosing hashtags depending on your niche can be complicated if you don’t consider the following tips:

• Look out for the total number of posts attached with the hashtag
• Investigate into the photos ‘above the fold’ or the first 9-10 photos without scrolling the page
• Calculate the average likes and comments of those 9 photos and compare them with your content engagement. Try to find a less competitive hashtag.

Continue to evaluate the average number of likes and comments on the hashtag and try to match it with your average engagement.

As simple as it sounds, hashtags are hard to navigate since Instagram’s algorithms are quite challenging. You can improve your Instagram’s SEO by incorporating artificial intelligence systems and intelligent automation to help you with methods, tactics, and strategies.

Pro tip: Find hashtags with lower competition still very relevant.

4. Twitter

Looking at this, you can determine the popularity of this social media platform.

Twitter allows you to amp up your social media SEO, both on and off the app. Keyword implementation is a must as Google can index tweets and twitter accounts. Along with using proper hashtags, your focus should be to find a method that gives you great results.

Focus on:

• Tweets
• Keywords
• Hashtags

You need to consider your tweets’ quality to help you grow your in-app and search engine SEO. Create tweets that are ‘tweetable’ viz, length of the tweets, inclusion of images and links, relevance to the target audience, and likewise.

Do you like retweeting?

Yes, you should! About 78% of engagement with a brand’s tweets comes from re-tweets. Tweets with photos get 150% more retweets than text-based tweets.

Use abbreviations or small phrases in your post to change its likelihood of being re-tweeted from 23 times down to only 10 times. Phrase tweets in a trendy manner, videos, images, GIFs to grab eyeballs.

Mostly, tweets revolve around current events and relatable topics that are considered to boost traffic. Don’t be afraid to phrase your tweets to make it conversational and fun at the same time.

Ask questions around your niche such that your audience can connect and give their opinions on the same.

Optimize keywords in your tweets as Google crawls to appear in search engines. Add your target keywords in your profile name or bio and build links to your Twitter page to acquire massive traffic and search engine rankings.

Twitter is filled with trending hashtags and collate all tweets that have used the hashtag in one topic. Users even search hashtags to find a collection of all tweets belonging to the same subject.

Experts recommend using more than 2 hashtags per tweet. Avoid using multiple hashtags in a tweet as that can lead to spamming your business.

Create your own hashtag to strike a conversation around your brand. Make a point to include hashtags with your business cards, packaging, banners, ads, etc.

Over to you!

The concept of ‘social media SEO’ can be a difficult task in the starting. However, you need to make it easy by understanding your social media platforms and diligently analysing your customer’s behaviour to offer the best.

Search for reliable keywords that are specific to each platform, including incentives, images, engagement, hashtags, etc.

Guest article written by: Hemal Bhatt works as a Digital Marketing Specialist at e-Intelligence. e-Intelligence provides digital marketing and web development services. They are equipped with the right innovative strategy, technical knowledge and a professional team to help achieve business goals.