It is the similarities between SEO and Social Media that allow them to work together easily to the benefit of your online business. How so, you ask? Social Media plan relies largely on the content strategy and market segment you have selected, and the same goes for your SEO strategy. Both involve regular keyword research, monitoring of your target market’s activity as well as gauging the results of your efforts consistently.
Search Engine Optimization, SEO, drives your website rank up to the first page of search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo so your site is found more easily, while Social Media Marketing builds your online brand awareness and garners new online relationships. Just by definition they seem to intuitively lean towards one another in building online business.
Like many marketing tools, the effective integration of SEO and Social Media will provide a better Return on Investment, ROI, than using either of them alone. Due to the similarities in the setup of SEO and Social Media, it’s a simpler process to integrate your SEO and Social Media and can produce measurable results in a short amount of time than many other marketing pairings.
Time, Time, Time…
With any marketing plan, the timeline to see effective results can vary greatly depending on the medium or media you select for your content strategy. As previously noted, integrating SEO and Social Media can show results in as little as two months time, but there are a few criteria that have to be crossed off the “TO DO” list as you initiate this integration of marketing tactics.
1. Build a Content Strategy. More than just “what do you want to say”, your content strategy needs to include extensive competitive analysis of your top 3 or 4 competitors’ websites as well as their Social Media presence. Once you look at your competition, you need to narrow down to the top 4 or 5 keyword phrases you want to rank for with the SEO aspect of your plan and integrate them into the content strategy you plan to use for your social media profiles, pages and blogs.
Tip: Keywords are those phrases that best describe your business, products and services that can help your website be found on the web. Be sure that you use hyperlinks from these phrases back to your website so anyone reading your content can gain access to your site. It is these text hyperlinks that build the back links on the web that can help drive your SEO.
2. Find your Target Market. Find out what your target market is talking about online and where they’re talking about it. Once you find them in the social-sphere, begin sharing your content with them to garner brand building and click-thru’s to your website from your content that will help drive your organic SEO.
Tip: Use bit.ly links in your social media content to allow for real-time tracking of click-thru’s from your content shares.
3. Monitor with Metrics. No marketing plan can be truly effective over any length of time without a metrics report to monitor network growth, click-thru rates, website rank on each of the Big 3 Search engines, Google, Bing and Yahoo and back links to your site from your content sharing. Each of these criteria work together to give a very real picture of the effectiveness of your integrated SEO and Social Media plan.
SEO and Social Media are not the only marketing tools that can work together to drive your brand building efforts and overall ROI. However, since their combined goal is to get your website and brand name in front of as many web users as possible, they are a powerful combination that business owners need to seriously consider.