How to combine SEO and social media to grow your business audience

Content marketing is all about entertaining and informing your audience. Conversely, social media helps promote your content. SEO on the other hand is all about ensuring that the technical issues are dealt with in order for search engines to make your content visible.

Fundamentally, all of these elements work towards helping you achieve some relevance towards your respective audience.

Social media and SEO are all under the same umbrella, which helps in increasing website traffic and acquiring clients by the use of valuable content. In part, this happens due to the various changes that come with Google algorithms which factor in social signals as part of their indicators in search engine rankings.

In order to ensure that an organic marketing plan works for your business or company, you need to know how SEO and social media work together to bring similar or even greater results to your website ranking.

How SEO and social media combine and improve organic marketing

The Internet is a public library that is ever growing and filled with content that has no central system. Google makes use of a crawl system to gather pages and create an index. As such, it is important to know where to find what you are looking for. The process may prove to be tedious due to the amount of content that is produced every hour of everyday. By using Twitter, you can cut down on the amount of time it would take you to find something on Google as Twitter generates a lot of traction.

The amount of tweets and retweets and the time-frame of content shared helps reduce the period as this is considered when the content is indexed. The indexation of the content is imperative for SEO as it determines how fast it is indexed, and this will be the determinant for how quickly you get the reward for your website’s organic traffic.

Sharing using social media is similar to link building

The number of link-backs to your website is what determines how high the ranking will be on Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). However, there are limitations to this as factors such as keyword stuffing, creating fake websites that may link back to your website, or the use of invisible text in an effort to manipulate optimization is considered as black-hat or overly-aggressive SEO techniques.

Therefore, Google makes use of Facebook posts, Tweets, +1s and other social signals which show that your site is not manipulated. Today, you do not have to work too hard to create link juice as social media and SEO work together to provide more link backs to your website.

Social media influence helps boost your authority

Depending on how credible your sources are, Google will rank your website or blog a lot higher. In addition, this determines credibility based on the number of people who will link back to your website or blog. Essentially, Google takes heavy consideration of your social media influence. This is determined based on reach, relevance,  and resonance, among other factors.

In order to find out how well you rank with Google on these factors, you need to ask yourself a few questions:

• Is there relevance in your content and your brand?
• How many people reach your content once you share it on your social profile?
• Are there a significant number of people who engage with the content found on your website or blog?

Google and Google+ go hand in hand

Google must factor in the presence of your brand on Google+. It is suggested that you spend at least 10 minutes each day on your Google+ brand’s page. You may use this time to post some relevant content for your Google+ communities. You need to post content that is relevant to your brand, and that will be essential in boosting your ranking on Google+ in order to show that you merit a higher position in the Google search engine.

There is not much technicality in SEO anymore

Today, content is king insofar as the many changes that Google has gone through. Google requires the best and adequately relevant content in order to achieve higher ranking. As such, SEO has changed into a form that is more human friendly. Content that can be understood once searched. Google today checks the type of content that you share with people as opposed to the number of keywords that your website or blog contains.

The technical details still apply concerning URL, H1, title tag, and Meta description. Nevertheless, it is the manner in which you make use of keywords to give answers to those who visit your website or blog that matters the most. As opposed to making use of a single keyword like “nutritious food,” you need to optimize the content with an explanation like “how nutritious food helps your body.”

Growing a follower base

In order to have a high quality rank with Google, you need to have a good following. High quality followers always click to your social channels and most of these followers are not just passive but interact and engage with you. The interaction may be in the form of retweets, reviews on Google+, re-pinning pins, or engaging with the various posts you have on Facebook.

When you have engaging followers, there are always link backs to your site and you are assured of high traffic to the site or blog that you are trying to market. Social signals may be a very real factor when considering the results you will get with SEO. Search engines will try to check the social signals that point back to your site and the number of people who share the content that you are sharing on social media sites.

It is imperative to realize that there are high quality and low quality followers. High quality followers ensure that you get no penalty from Facebook or Google that punishes such offenders who have fake likes on Facebook with low ranking. Therefore, make a solid base of crucial followers who will ensure that your blog or website remains authentic.

Jack Dawson is a web developer and UI/UX specialist at BigDropInc.com. He works at a design, branding and marketing firm, having founded the same firm 9 years ago. He likes to share knowledge and points of view with other developers and consumers on platforms.