By Marquis Matson
In this age of social media, any marketer who has been slow to use SEO strategies to stand out on social media will soon find themselves in an increasingly small crowd of marketers stuck in the past. Indeed, failure to use SEO strategies to grow your brand visibility on social media is bound to cost your business a great deal.
You cannot claim to be doing everything in your power to grow on social media if you have not yet began leveraging SEO strategies on these social networking sites. Without this, a marketer’s efforts, no matter how hard, towards optimizing the opportunities that exist on social networking platforms are at risk of disappearing in thin air. Great SEO practices are the foundation for any marketer towards obtaining the best results on social media.
Here are 6 proven SEO strategies for social media that you need to know. Some of them might be familiar to you while others might be new, but either way, you are sure to find helpful ideas that you are yet to apply, in your effort to strengthen your SEO and social media.
1. Make Your Content Segmented, Searchable, Snackable, and Shareable
To obtain the best results on social media, brands and marketers need to make sure their content has the following characteristics:
- Segmented
- Snackable
- Searchable
- Shareable
Create segmented content
Here each content must be designed in a way that addresses the needs and requirements of an audience segment that you know very well. Ask yourself, does my audience care about what I have to say? If you cannot answer this question with a yes, don’t even attempt to create any content.
Make your content searchable
When making content, you have to keep in mind that it has to be searchable. Use keywords that customers are searching for in your niche., and make sure that whatever content you are creating has included those keywords.
Make your content snackable
In social media marketing, content that is snackable stands a high chance of drawing more attention. Snackable means that your content has to be labelled, scannable, chunked, and well-organized. The content should include things like headings and subheadings, tables and charts as well as illustrations.
Make your content shareable
If you can’t tell if what you are publishing is shareable, there are many tools you can use to track your social media shares. And of course numbers don’t lie. After you track your social shares, you can tell whether your content is doing well in terms of how many shares it gets. If you have a low number of social shares, that suggest that you need to learn ways through which you can make your content shareable and apply them in your content.
2. Use Social Media Meta Tags Wisely
Social media meta tags are specific HTML snippets tags of text or image context that generate a summary for a website page. Meta tags often shows up whenever a person shares a link in messaging, social media platforms or in their business chat software. With social media meta tags, a user can preview their content by editing and experimenting with them. They get the chance to see how their webpage would actually look on Facebook, Google,Twitter and other digital platforms.
Moreover, meta tags contain information that can help web search engines scan your social site to figure out the nature of your site and determine whether it is legit or not.
When you associate your content with meta tags, your social shares will get more attention increasing brand visibility and exposure. The good thing about meta tags is that, not only are they useful for content that you are about to publish but also to the old content as well. Provided the old content is still relevant, adding up meta tags could give the content a huge boost.
3. Optimize Your Posts for Searches
Optimizing your posts for searches mostly applies to existing content. One thing marketers should realize is that, in addition to online news articles and Google’s knowledge graph entries, Google has a tendency to favor popular web pages found at the top of its Search Engine Results Pages (SERP).
However, this does not mean that sites found on top of Google SERPs are there permanently. Your business webpage can also attain a high position on Google. All you have to is make sure your post or content are optimized for searches. There are a few things you can do to make sure your page is optimized on search engines such as:
- Using the right keywords for your posts
- Carefully choosing the tile for your content
- Optimizing your headings
- Using relevant internal links
4. Use a SEO-Auditing Tool — and Understand Its Limitations
Social media marketing is about driving organic traffic to your web page and improve your site’s ranking on search engines. And therefore, if you are to maintain high page rankings you need to perform website audits on a regular basis. A website audit should be the first step in SEO for effective results.
An effective SEO website audit helps brands and marketers uncover what might be wrong with their social site or web page and tackle these areas as soon as possible. Before you start your local SEO audit make sure that:
- You check your business or company name reach as well as NAP-name, address and phone number-visibility.
- Study your business geographical location
- Take a serious look into your business website, blog or listing
- Do a research about your competitors
Then use an effective SEO-auditing tool such as SEOptimer to help you focus on the right keywords and search phrases to use to optimize your page.
5. Focus on Locally-Optimized Posts
Social networks provide brands with the perfect opportunity to engage with their local community, sending certain local-specific authority signals to popular search engines. There are a several ways that brands can use to engage with their local community including making updates:
- Whenever their company or business participate in a local event such as a festival, trade show or an event.
- And when your brand interact and engage with other local brands
This reinforces your brand’s participation in the local community making your posts more visible on your social media channels and in local searches.
6. Use On-Page Metadata Wisely
On-page metadata is data that describes other data on a website. As confusing as it may sound metadata is used to give descriptions of individual pages found on a website, allowing web search engines to understand each web page. It includes the following types that plays a big role in SEO:
- HTML title and meta description
- Search-friendly URL
- Alt tags
And unlike other off-page SEO factors, backlinks, and social media shares, on page metadata is always within your control.
Give each page an HTML title and meta description that work as an “ad” in search results
In on-page metadata, the most essential piece for SEO is the HTML tag title (also called the page title). Use your customer’s search keyword words in your meta descriptions and HTML titles. Although some people like using cute names, in metadata, those names might not work.
Give each page a search-friendly URL
Search-friendly URL come as the second most important internet pieces in metadata. They are like small spiders that reads a page’s URL address to figure out its content. URL is the identifier a string of characters that identifies any resource that is connected to the web such as sound files, images, and hypertext pages.
Give each image an alt tag
Everytime you use or publish an image, make sure you assign to it an alt tag. Alt tags are strings of texts that are associated with a certain image published on a website. These strings of texts enable search spiders as well as visually impaired people to interpret images on the internet.
In conclusion, the more you use these SEO strategies, the higher your web pages rank, not only on search engines but also on social networking channels.
