How SEO & Social Media Marketing Work Together To Create The Greatest Online Results
More often than not, people tend to put SEO, social media marketing and traditional marketing into three separate “buckets”. Until they decide to dig a little deeper, they may think that each one operates independently from the others.
The truth is all three categories fall under the larger umbrella of marketing. On their own, each only supports part of the overall business needs. Yet, when used in harmony, they work together to create a dynamic marketing strategy.
Where people often get it wrong is easily seen in social media. Here, the temptation exists to think in terms of each individual platform: Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. The platform is the platform; you post content and hope to gain a following, end of story.
But that approach leaves a lot of opportunity on the table.
The same is true about SEO. Many people think of SEO as only being applicable to your website and its content. But that is only part of what’s possible. Marry up your SEO and your social media and boom, you’re on to something big.
How Social Media Complements Your SEO & Helps Grow Your Platform
Social media marketing is not just you connecting with your customers and having fun while doing so. And your website is not the only place where you need to be concerned about SEO
As it turns out, SEO is quite important to your social media marketing and your social media marketing can have a significant impact on your website’s traffic. Remember that the purpose of SEO is to improve your search engine ranking. Believe it or not, your social media is an excellent way to accomplish this.
Now to be clear, your social media strategies do not have a direct impact on your search engine ranking for your website. However, it can have a significant overall impact on your SEO. Not to mention some of your social media posts can rank on Google.
Let’s take a look at how your social media footprint can affect your traffic, the profitability of your business, and build your platform.
Social media builds external links
Social sharing creates the opportunity to spread your content far and wide. When you do this right, it also increases your visibility and the likelihood of external links back to your content.
The net effect of that is very pleasing to Google.
When Google or any other search engine determines search engine rankings, they take things like page visits and bounce rate into consideration. How many visits are made your page? Daily? Monthly? Weekly? How long are visitors staying on a particular page before clicking off from your site? High traffic and low bounce rate can most certainly help you land on the first page of search results.
Social media helps to share your content
The use of social media can help you share your content faster than search engines alone. Creating high-quality content and subsequently sharing it allows you to get by — with a little help from your friends. As your audience reads and interacts with your content, chances are they will share it. As this content is repeatedly shared, it increases your reach. The end result is more visitors to your site.
More qualified visitors to your site means an improvement in your EAT score with Google and that often results in higher search engine ranking.
Increases your brand awareness
Sharing information on social media helps connect your brand, your name or your company’s name with your particular industry. Doing so puts you and your business at the forefront of the user’s mind. Subsequently, when users search for information about the services you offer chances are they will search for you directly.
Helps you reach a mobile audience
Search engines aim to satisfy the needs of its users. Increasingly, they are recognizing the value that social media provides when it comes to the content people are looking for. As a result content from Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms are showing up on search results more often. Statistically, these platforms are accessed more often on smartphones. In fact, as of 2018, there were 200 million Facebook users. Of those users, 179 million access the app on their smartphones.
The takeaway here is that your social media posts are becoming more important when it comes to increasing your visibility and raising brand awareness.
Increases the size of your overall platform
If you have an interest in publishing a book, whether through a traditional publishing house or via a self-publishing outlet, the size of your platform is a critical element to attend to. Your platform is the overall size, reach, and influence you hold over the topic you’re writing on. In this case, size DEFINITELY matters.
The stronger your connection online (and offline) to people who might one day buy your book, the better. Books are still a big goal for many healers. If publishing your book is a goal for you, growing your blog, social media presence, and newsletter list are an incredibly important projects that you need to get started on today.
Relationship building and trust
When it comes to marketing, social media is one of the best ways to establish trust with your audience. Ideally, your social media posts will show your readers who you are. They will show that you’re relatable, human and one of them. Why am I telling you this? Because when it comes to building a business, there is one thing you need to understand. People will continually come back to the resources they trust.
Building relationships with your potential customers and gaining their trust can help you win them over as future clients. When this specific audience has further questions, chances are they will visit your website.
And of course, we know the formula: more website visits = higher search engine ranking.
Now that we’ve seen how social media marketing affects SEO, let’s switch gears and see how SEO can complement traditional marketing.
How SEO Complements Traditional Marketing
Anyone with a pulse and a smartphone can tell you that traditional marketing just doesn’t pass muster these days — by itself. However, using traditional forms of advertising in conjunction with SEO may be a great marketing strategy.
In reality, traditional and digital marketing are meant to complement each other.
Consumers as a group tend to straddle two worlds. Some are online and some are not. From a marketing perspective, choosing only one strategy would inevitably alienate a portion of your overall market. However, using an elegant combination of the two can help you cast a much wider net.
It can be argued that the end game for traditional marketing has changed.
Here’s what I mean. Picture a customer is listening to the radio or watching TV and an ad comes on for Apple’s latest phone or some new product by XYZ brand.
Today’s customer is not going to hash out a plan to visit an Apple store in the coming weekend. Chances are, the customer is going to grab their smartphone, probably the previous generation iPhone, and proceed to look up the specs of the latest and greatest.
A 30-second commercial cannot really tell them what they need to know to make a smart purchase. However, a website can. Marketers know this and they are quite familiar with this sequence of events.
A website or access to information also serves the purpose of giving the consumer a little more power in their decision-making process. Gone are the days when a 30-second commercial was the be all end all of advertising and consumers were at the mercy of salespeople, knowledgeable or not.
Having a website that consumer can refer to is a boon to any business anywhere, including yours.
This concept of research before you buy also applies to service-based businesses. Particularly in the health and wellness field. It’s a no brainer that when potential clients are looking for help with mental health, for example, they will do their due diligence and seek out the very best. In this case, that’s you.
Consumers and clients are extremely discerning in today’s market. Truth be told there’s no reason for them not to be. They have access to information and they have choices. They are going to visit the website of a service provider or product they are interested in. In fact, research shows that 88% of consumers conduct online research before buying a product in a physical store.
That’s why SEO is so important. SEO complements traditional marketing because it leads with the words and phrases that clients actually use on their buyer’s journey. When done right, traditional forms of marketing are peppered with keywords that relate to the consumer’s needs, business, and industry. Weaving keywords into the ad copy ensure that customers remember that specific phrase in relation to you and your business.
Using SEO effectively keeps you and your business in the forefront of the customer’s mind. When those customers conduct their own research entering those keywords as search terms will ideally lead them to your website.
The thing to remember about marketing in the 21st century is that there is no magic bullet. There is no definitive answer as to which strategy is best.
Business owners, counselors, and therapists have to figure out what works best for them and their target market.
There was never a rule that said you must pick one marketing strategy and stick to it. Marketing, on the whole, is a dynamic field. Stagnation, falling behind on technology and sticking your head in the sand are recipes for disaster. SEO still makes a difference, even when you choose a traditional advertising campaign. And social media contributes greatly to your overall SEO success. Think of it as one big happy family.
Has your SEO, social media or content marketing strategy failed you? Or maybe you’re not even out of the gate yet? We can help. Schedule a free consultation with our team or learn more about an SEO site audit to help evaluate your site’s SEO needs.
