Social Media SEO: 8 Strategies
Thursday 14th November 2024
by Beth Perrin
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While SEO (search engine optimisation) primarily refers to the process of optimising your brand’s website to make it as discoverable as possible on platforms like Google and Bing, social media can also come into play when building your SEO strategy. This is especially true in today’s digital climate, where social media is widely used as a way of finding brands and products - especially for younger demographics. In fact, compared with 94% of Baby Boomers, only 64% of Gen Z use traditional search engines for brand discovery. What’s more, 46% of Gen Z and 35% of Millennials say they prefer social media over search engines when looking for answers online.
Social SEO can be defined in two ways:
• The act of optimising your social profiles and posts so they can be found more easily on each platform - this can involve things like using relevant hashtags, writing keyword-rich captions, adding alt text to your images and more.
• Using your social profiles and content to drive traffic to your website via the inclusion of links (known in the SEO world as backlinks).
Today we’re sharing our top 8 strategies for social media SEO, so if your brand is in need of a boost within the search results, read on to learn what to do next.
1. Incorporate Keywords
Keyword research involves finding out which words and phrases are commonly being entered into search engines and social media search bars by potential customers who are looking for businesses, products and services like yours. After this, you can ensure you’re using these keywords abundantly throughout your website and social media content, ultimately increasing your chances of appearing in the SERP (search engine results page) when someone searches for one of them.
• Start by making a list of broad topics based on your business - these could be your products, services, collections and offers. Here at 3sixfive, for example, we would include terms like “social media agency”, “community management”, “sentiment analysis” and “customer service”, as these explain what we are and what we do.
• Then, think of some longer phrases that come under each of these topic brackets. These are called long-tail keywords, and can include questions - such as “Why is community management necessary for brands?” and “Can I outsource my social media customer service?”.
• Next, take a look at the monthly search volume for each of your keywords to see how common each one is, and therefore how much value it has to your brand. There are plenty of free online tools where you can access this data, such as Searchvolume.io and Wordstream for website keywords, and Brandwatch for social hashtags. Search volumes are constantly changing, so make sure to monitor yours regularly to keep up with evolving search engine trends and popular topics on social media.
Bear in mind that the shorter the keyword or hashtag, the higher its search volume is likely to be, making it more competitive - aka, lots of results will appear when this term is searched for. Medium-tail keywords tend to be moderately competitive, and long-tail keywords are generally less competitive. Fewer people are searching for these, but if you use them, you’re more likely to rank due to their high specificity.
2. Include Links in Your Content
Including links in your social media content and ads is a great way to send traffic to your website, although you should bear in mind that some social platforms penalise accounts that post too many links by limiting their reach. An excessive amount of links can also make your content feel spammy, which can be offputting for your followers, so it’s important not to over-use them or include them in every single post.
However, using them strategically and making sure you always include a relevant CTA can certainly encourage clicks and incentivise people to take subsequent actions once they’ve arrived on your website, such as making a purchase or signing up to your newsletter.
Shortening your links with a tool like Bitly or TinyURL can help your links look more appealing and less spam-like, increasing the likelihood that users will trust them and click on them - especially if you customise your URLs with your brand name or campaign name. Plus, many URL shorteners offer tracking capabilities that show you how many people have clicked on your links, helping you measure the success of your content and ads.
3. Optimise Your Profiles & Bios
It’s a good idea to think of your social media pages as extensions of your website. Just as you would optimise your web pages with page titles, meta descriptions and keywords, you should also make sure your social profiles are filled out with all the correct info and necessary details to help users find you and to give yourself a better chance of being promoted within each platform’s algorithm.
• Choose the right page name and @username
• Select your business category
• Write a compelling bio
• Add up to 5 website links to your Instagram page
• Add an Action Button to your Instagram page
• Include your contact details
• Add your services to your Facebook page (if applicable)
It’s important to use the same email, website, address and phone number across all of your social profiles in order to help Google verify the legitimacy of your business. NAP, which stands for ‘name, address, phone number’ is a crucial part of SEO - especially local SEO. If these details aren’t consistent across the internet, Google is less likely to place your brand high in the rankings as it can’t trust that users are being served reliable information, so it’s worth double checking that these are displayed correctly.
4. Focus on Current Trends
While traditional SEO content is more evergreen (aka it primarily focuses on staying fresh and relevant for an extended duration), social media is much more fast-paced and is all about the here and now. Trending topics and videos can rapidly climb the rankings on social platforms and become viral overnight, whereas website content needs to be sustained over a longer period of time to reach your SEO goals.
Keep a close eye on current trends, memes, content formats, audio clips and pop culture moments and find ways to connect them with your brand if possible, as this will help you create fresh, relevant and engaging content that social algorithms will want to prioritise. Newer posts often get higher visibility too, so posting regularly instead of leaving long gaps between each piece of content will further aid your discoverability.
5. Employee Ambassadors & EGC
Your team members can also help to amplify your brand’s social media presence and therefore make your pages easier to find. Content shared by employees receives 8x more engagement than content shared by company channels, so where possible, you should encourage your team members to share your posts and upload their own brand-related content on their personal pages if they feel comfortable doing so. This is especially useful on professional networking platforms like LinkedIn, where employees reportedly have around 10x more connections than the company they work for. Topics they could talk about include:
• Their experience interviewing with and joining your company
• Individual or team wins
• Achievements made by the business
• Your company culture, mission, and values
• A day in the life at their workplace
They should make sure to tag your company page in their posts and/or include links to your website to encourage internal clicks and to direct traffic to your desired destinations.
6. Add Social Sharing Buttons to Your Website
Social sharing buttons can be effective for both social SEO and website SEO if you place them strategically - for example, on content that’s highly shareable, like blog posts or product pages. Remember that people often skim through web pages or decide to share before they’ve finished reading, so if your content requires lots of scrolling, consider placing your share buttons towards the top or side to maximise their visibility and usage.
7. Add Alt Text to Your Social Images
All social media platforms now give you the option to add alt text (also known as image descriptions) to the images you upload, which not only makes them more accessible for people using screen readers and other assistive technologies, but also provides an opportunity to reiterate your keywords. Here’s how to add alt text on the following platforms:
• X
Social media management platforms like Sprout Social and Hootsuite also allow users to add alt text when posting images via their publishing tools.
Remember that the primary purpose of alt text is to aid accessibility, so when writing your descriptions, you should focus first and foremost on accurately explaining what’s in the image rather than keyword stuffing. This can result in a negative user experience and may be seen by search engines and social platforms as an attempt to manipulate the SERPs, ultimately damaging your ranking and trustworthiness. However, there’s nothing wrong with incorporating your keywords in a natural way as long as you keep things relevant and concise - ideally a maximum of 125 characters.
8. Add Captions to Your Videos
Seeing as captions are text files that search engine bots and social media algorithms can read, adding them to your videos and making sure to include your desired keywords and phrases can make them more searchable and indexable. Subtitles and captions have also been proven to increase video views by 80%, so not only will they boost your brand’s discoverability online, they’ll also make it more likely that people will watch your content all the way through.
Most platforms give you the option to either add auto-generated captions or upload your own SubRip (.srt) file. Here’s how to add them on the following platforms:
• TikTok
• X
Summary
When paired with a consistent publishing schedule, well-optimised and high quality content can undoubtedly improve your brand’s visibility on search engines like Google and make it easier for people to find your social media posts and pages within the search results. Whether you’ve already implemented social SEO into your marketing plan and want to elevate your ranking or haven’t yet started, we hope the strategies we’ve shared above will help your business gain more attention online and reach the right audiences. Find us on X @3sixfivepro to share your own optimisation tips and let us know what’s worked for you.
