Search engine optimization and social media are often thought of as separate marketing strategies. However, with the Google Hummingbird Algorithm update and the rising importance of social signals for ranking factors in Google search, SEO and social media are closer than ever. According to a 2013 Rank Correlation Study conducted by Searchmetrics, social signals accounted for seven out the top 10 ranking factors.
What does this mean for digital marketing professionals? It’s time to start integrating social media and SEO programs and utilize both techniques to increase traffic to websites and promote brands online. Here are three ways that SEO and social media work together:
1. Social Signals
Social signals occur when a social media site posts a link to your website and that link receives shares or likes. Building a strong social media presence helps create social signals to your site, which ultimately helps improve your rankings in organic search results. If your site has a blog, it’s important to add social media plugins that allow readers to easily share content through social outlets.
2. Link Building
The Google Hummingbird Algorithm focuses on creating more conversational searches and increases the importance social signals in ranking factors. More popular content is considered more relevant to searches on Google. Therefore, promoting your blog articles through social media helps generate organic links to your site. If you post content that people want to link back to, you are crowdsourcing your link building and cutting link building efforts in half.
3. Content Marketing
Content marketing strategies should be thought of in terms of both SEO and social media. How can you create content that helps your site rank higher in search results? Create sharable AND keyword optimized content. The more sharable your content, the more organic links you are likely to receive. Know your target audience, create unique content to serve that audience and relate it back to your brand.
The battle of SEO and social media is coming to end. These once fierce competitors are now teaming up and working together to increase brand awareness and traffic to their websites. Instead of thinking of SEO and social media as two different elements, digital marketers must learn how both work together and incorporate that into digital marketing strategies. Is SMO ( Social Media Optimization) the new hybrid of SEO and social media? I suppose only Google can determine that fate.
