7 Tips for Startups on Using SEO with Social Media
Around half of the whole world is now on social media. This means that you have a high chance of reaching your customers and clients through social media platforms.
However, it’s not as easy as creating an account and waiting for followers. You have to know some social media marketing strategies.
Aside from connecting with your audience, you can also use social media to improve your SEO. Combining the two can give you wonderful benefits, but only if you know how to use them.
Interested? Keep on reading to learn how you can use SEO with social media.
1. Post on a Regular Schedule
Upping the frequency of posting on social media is good for SEO. It helps build your presence, raise brand awareness, and increase customer engagement.
How so?
Well, if you don’t post that often, people tend to forget about your brand. They may lose interest and look for other accounts to follow instead.
The more they see you on their timeline, the more they’ll remember you. It also encourages them to participate in discussions, although seeing your brand regularly is enough to foster trust and loyalty.
2. Use the Less Popular Keywords
Social media has search engines, too, so you should also pay attention to keywords.
Businesses may feel tempted to target popular keywords. After all, these have the highest potential reach.
However, the bigger companies are already targeting these keywords. They have more resources to become successful, so it will be hard to compete with them.
Startups should focus instead on the less popular ones and long-tail keywords. If big brands can target, “shoes,” you can instead target, “men’s sneaker shoes New York” or something similar. This is also a good strategy for local SEO.
3. Do Proper Keyword Research
Speaking of keywords, remember that these are user-driven. You should base these on what actual users are typing into the search box.
Doing this, you can create organic posts around keywords that users have an actual interest in. You’ll get higher success in catching the attention of users and getting them to engage with your posts.
You can use SEO tools to help you with finding the right keywords. Such tools help you find out about other related keywords based on a given keyword. They may also tell you the competitiveness of each keyword.
You can also do it the manual way by typing a keyword in the search box. Then, copy the most common suggestions. Although it seems simple, it’s a good way of seeing what people are searching for.
4. Publish High-Quality Content
Did you know that social media posts can get indexed by Google? It doesn’t take into account your number of followers and social shares. Rather, it indexes the post as if it were a regular webpage.
This is why posting high-quality content is worth the effort. It must gather a lot of likes and shares, and it will do better for your brand if you stay away from spam.
It should also spark organic conversations to do well on social media. Ask a question or use calls-to-action to encourage people to comment or share the post.
5. Optimize Your Social Media Profile
When you search for Robert Downey Jr., you’ll likely get the social media profiles associated with the celebrity. You’ll get their Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts if they have any. This is because Google deems these accounts relevant to your search.
Optimize your social media so that it also shows when people search for your startup name. This is the easiest way to direct them to where you can continuously engage with them.
It’s also a good idea to optimize your profile for keywords in your industry. Put these keywords in places like your description and posts. This also gives the chance for your social media page to rank for these keywords.
6. Use Images and Videos
Humans are visual creatures; we can process visuals 60,000 times faster than other types of content. They’re more eye-catching than text, so posts with images tend to draw more attention. People would stop scrolling to look at the image for longer.
It’s also the same for videos and GIFs. They might even work better because the movement is intriguing and more eye-catching.
That’s why you should use images and other types of media in your posts as much as possible.
While you’re at it, you can optimize such files for SEO. Insert a relevant keyword in the file name and select the right size and format. It must load fast — people have become pretty impatient, so they’ll lose interest if the image fails to load in a couple of seconds.
The title text and alt text must also contain the keywords, although make sure they still make sense.
7. Stay up to Date With SEO Rules
Don’t forget that you should also follow the latest rules of SEO with social media. Gone are the days when you can spam popular keywords and get to the top.
Both Google and social media platforms update its algorithms often to keep the content relevant to users. The algorithms have become more sophisticated with time. And they’re getting much better at cracking down on spam content.
As such, the old strategies won’t work anymore.
The quality of your content is what matters today, as well as its shareability. The number of likes and shares is what improves your social ranking, so you have to focus on publishing posts for the people rather than the search engine. Of course, optimizing for search engines comes second.
That might change tomorrow, so you have to keep your eyes peeled for updates.
Learn More About Using SEO With Social Media
Learning the benefits of SEO can go a long way in establishing your startup’s presence on social media and the internet as a whole. It’s not an easy task, though. If you need more help in using SEO with social media, don’t hesitate to contact us today.
