Too many people ask me why Social Media is important to your SEO marketing efforts so I thought it would be worthwhile to go over why social signals will improve your overall online marketing strategy.
The major search engines are looking for fresh quality content and lots of it. They are not looking for duplicate content or information that people are not interested in. If the content is good then it will automatically be interesting for people who will then share the content with their friends and other users online. If it is great content then more and more people will share it; the search engines are looking at these social signals to help determine if your content is good.
What is good content?
Good content needs to be something that people are interested in. You need to try and avoid having too much information about how good your company is or how well you have been doing. People want to know more about content that is useful to them, is news worthy, or is generally fun and interesting.
Extracting great content from other people’s blogs and adding your two cents is also a great technique to use. Make sure thought that you credit the original author when you do this.
So what do search engines look for with regards to Social Media?
The first thing to remember is to be natural in the way you share on social media. If you can look at social sharing in the same way you look at link building. These days Google hates link farms or paid links and can easily spot when that is happening; try to build your social network naturally through having great content to share that people want to read.
There are also a number of signals that search engines are looking at that help them to rank your website such as the number of social followers (fans), how often you get your content shared or retweeted, who is sharing your content and what authority do they have. There are a number of other items that are also taken into account.
So what’s the point?
We know that social signals are important so it’s important to your marketing success that you invest some time in Social Media.
There are a number of things you can do with your web and social media properties but most importantly it is to have a plan. Creating content with engaging blogs and videos is not the easiest thing to manage. When you think about managing your social calendar and seeing what trends are happening social media becomes a lot more involved. Having a social media plan will allow you to be more effective and ensure that it actually gets done; too many businesses start off well and then let social media drop away.
Many businesses employ Social Media management companies to handle their social media efforts which is a great way to ensure that it does get done; you need to treat your social media management company as part of your marketing team. A good social media team will mean a lot more interaction between you and your customer base, making it easier for you to get information out there and ultimately creating a more loyal and accepting customer base.
Social Signals and SEO
It’s time to get to it! Social media and social signals are a factor in search engine rankings. SEO is not going away and social media is therefore something you can’ ignore.
Start by writing some great content and sharing it across your networks. Don’t have time? Let me know and I can help recommend a good company to help you with all your Digital Marketing Campaigns.
