If you want to make social media a better marketing tool, SEO can help. Here is how you can combine SEO and social media for your marketing strategy.

About 68% of online experiences start with a search engine.

That means, your business needs SEO to rank high on search engines. A rank on page #1 will help you drive traffic and sales.

That said, about 54% of users also use social media to search for products or services. This also means that you need social media to thrive in the social space and get your business in front of as many eyes as possible.

Now, what if you can bring both SEO and social media together?

SEO and social media marketing go together like peanut butter and jelly. They're both good on their own, but when you combine them into one cohesive package, you get something much more powerful than the sum of its parts.

Here's how to combine SEO and social media for your digital marketing strategy.

Why Combine SEO and Social Media?

Before we talk about SEO and social media in detail, let's take a look at why combining them is crucial to your business.

SEO is the process of getting traffic from search engines like Google by ranking high in search results when someone types in certain keywords related to your business. If you rank high enough, people will see what you have to offer and click through to your website, where they can convert into leads or sales.

On the other hand, social media is about building relationships with your current and potential customers. You do this by interacting with them on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, or your blog. By engaging with people across these networks, you'll build brand awareness and gain insight into what content resonates most with your audience, which will help you optimize SEO rankings.

SEO and social media marketing have a symbiotic relationship with SEO feeding off of social signals and social media capitalizing upon SEO. The key to combining SEO with social media is thinking about it strategically.

Here are some ways you can integrate SEO and social media.

People Love Stories: Tell Yours

When sharing blog content via social media, use images to tell the story behind it. Your SEO strategy needs to be about storytelling because that's what draws readers in. The more engaging your posts, the higher your SEO will drive your posts up and at the same time increase social media engagement.

Answer Questions People are Asking on Social Media

When all you do is advertise, people tune out. When you answer their questions and do it thoughtfully, they check back with you often to learn more about how your products or services can help them.

If someone asks a question on any social media platform, whether Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, answer it there. You're driving traffic back to your site by showing them just how valuable they are.

SEO Yourself Into Blogging Success

SEO uses keywords and key phrases in blog titles, meta tags and titles, and overall content. However, this is not just for search engines anymore. While SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, the new SEO stands for Social Engagement Optimization.

SEO for SEO's sake is no longer an SEO strategy but a social media strategy. Build trust with your audience by making sure that your blog posts are SEO-friendly and valuable to them.

If people love what you're posting, they'll share it with their friends and family via Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or Instagram. Basically, every site that allows content sharing gives you another opportunity to build more traffic back into your site.

Conduct Keyword Research and Use the Right Words

When we talk about search optimization, we're not just talking about SEO. Social media SEO is also a big deal, and you'll want to make sure that the keywords you're using on social media networks are related to your SEO strategy. This goes hand in hand with your content strategy as well because it's not about how much you share but what you share.

The content you share on social channels plays a huge role in both SEO and social media marketing strategies. If it's not optimized for SEO or creating engagement with your target audience, then what good does it do? Creating compelling content isn't easy, but it's necessary if you want people to click through to your site and convert into customers.

Take Advantage of Link Building

SEO and social media go hand in hand when it comes to building links. You want to make sure you're creating content that people will link to and share on their websites, where they can rank well for SEO purposes. At the same time, you want to be careful not to over-optimize links or rely solely on links from other sites, as Google doesn't like that.

By combining SEO and social media, you're taking advantage of the best of both worlds. SEO can bring new traffic to your site, and social media marketing can convert that traffic into sales if the SEO is done correctly.

Find Out What Do Your Customers Think About You

Social media is about more than sharing content. It's also a great way to find out what people think about your company and its products or services and make sure they like it. Whatever communication you do on social networks should have the goal of building brand awareness rather than just selling something.

Once users have been exposed to your brand, SEO will do its job by helping those visitors navigate back to your website, where a percentage of them will become leads or customers. Social media marketing works well in conjunction with SEO by building awareness for your brand.

The more people see your name on social media platforms, the more likely they'll click through and find out what you have to offer them. This means spending time sharing unique content on multiple platforms and taking advantage of SEO on these platforms to make sure the content you share gets found.

SEO and Social Media: Why You Need Both for Your Digital Marketing Strategy

In this day and age, marketing with SEO alone is not enough. You need to combine SEO and social media in order to maximize the digital space and bring more customers to your business.  SEO will help you rank high on search engines and help consumers find you.

Social media will help you build brand awareness and engagement with those consumers so they can convert to local buying customers. That said, now that you know how SEO and social media work together, how about you get in touch with us and we’ll help you get started with a platform to create your own graphics?