How to Use Social Media to Drive Traffic

In recent times, social media has been the place where the majority of businesses interact with their customers, but the

interesting fact about this is that social media has a really strong effect on the search behavior of your customers. So you need to learn how to use social media to drive traffic and build your following.

Their taste, likes, and dislikes are majorly being influenced by the things they see on social media.

A lot of marketers know the role that social media plays in customer service, but they fail to acknowledge the connection between SEO and social media.

For us not to misunderstand ourselves, social media is not a ranking factor or a direct SEO shortcut. When we talk about social media influence on SEO, we are referring to the significant ways in which social media has proven to be a relevant part of SEO.

Evident Changes that Social Media Makes on SEO

The first evident significance we can mention here is that of visibility and credibility. Both factors are elements of the most important ranking signals that Google uses.

If your business is very active on social media, you will be sure of your business having a greater presence on the web; this fact will be much evident when your page or site comes up on SERP (search engine result pages).

The second and most important factor is that of intent. Although Google and other search engines recognize keywords and headlines, fulfilling the search intent of your users is a much greater factor than all of those.

In this case, when you make an explanation video on a social platform and you get feedback, Google would prefer to show those videos first before bringing up written answers to the topic.

Even if these search engines do not bring up your content, you can share them directly on social media by using links; these links will then be seen by your followers who might consider sharing them with their own followers. And with time, this will send a signal to these search engines that your site has valuable content that your potential audience might need.

Make sure that you schedule your social media for the best time for your audience.

Social Media Channels That Are Most Effective for SEO

1) Twitter: This platform is most predominant for its use of hashtags; these hashtags can be used as keywords for your content, and when people are using these hashtags, they will most definitely come across your keywords and that might lead them to your page.

2) YouTube: This platform has seen its popularity grow tremendously over the years. Out of ten active internet users, seven of them have come across and used this platform. This platform is a great way of sending a positive and effective signal to search engines.

3) Facebook: Over the years, people have used this platform for sharing content and it will be a very effective way of sharing infographics, videos, and links.

Here are 6 effective ways you can use social media posts to improve your SEO:

1. Make Quality and Size (word count) the Highest Priority

The connections and followers you have on social media will greatly determine the level of visibility your page or site is going to have in order to improve your rankings.

If you have dormant or inactive followers on your social media channels, it is not going to be as effective as it is supposed to be. The active followers will engage with your content while the inactive followers would not.

The first step to increasing the size of your followers is for you to spend time developing and presenting high-quality content; another way is to attract them by doing giveaways or asking for follow backs.

2. Work Earnestly on Your Content

This step has already been mentioned in the previous step but the importance of it cannot be overemphasized. As a person who wants to improve his SEO with social media, it is necessary to find ways to attract unique viewers and followers. A way of doing this is by planning out your content with the following steps.

• Perform a proper keyword search
• Use relevant hashtags
• Place those keywords that are important in your headings and subheadings

If you keep all these steps in mind while building out content, then you will be sure of producing something unique that your followers are looking for.

3. Identify Who You are and Build a Brand Presence

For you to produce an authentic, engaging, and strong brand presence, you will have to do more than stand out from the crowd. Most content creators do exactly what they see others do, but for someone who wants to build something unique, you have to ensure you optimize your content in a way that will be eye-catching and distinct to your potential audience.

All the pieces of content you have linked to your page or profile should contain relevant information that will increase the awareness of your followers towards your business, brand, or page.

4. Find Those Places Where Your Followers Are Hanging Out

The social media platforms you are engaged in should not be limited to the ones that were mentioned at the beginning of this article; you should try to also use other platforms where your potential audience might be.

If you limit your engagement to just one or two of these social platforms, you will deprive yourself of the opportunity of getting more audience.

5. Court the attention and action of your followers

Things like shares, comments, and likes are important factors of getting a good SEO performance for your site or brand. You can do this by placing a call to action on your posts or asking close followers to like and comment on your posts.

6. Input relevant information on your profile

Your profile has a great part to play in describing what your site, brand, or business is about, so you have to look for possible means of attaching relevant links and information about your site or business on your profile.

Are you in search of effective ways of using social media platforms to improve your Google search ranking and SEO? This is something we are going to take a look at in this article.

Trying to improve your SEO strategy is important because it increases your Google ranking and website’s visibility, but there is a lot of competition involved in getting to the front page when your keywords are searched. This article will give you practical steps you can use to handle those competitors.

Can One Say Social Media is Effective for SEO?

You cannot directly optimize your SEO ranking by using social media, but when you share your links across different social media platforms, it will help in increasing your site or Brand’s exposure and get you more traffic on your site.

Here are five ways social media helps search engine optimization:

• Drives your traffic and increases your visibility
• Increases the recognition of your site or brand
• Ensures proper distribution of your posts.

When you post content that your targeted audiences read and enjoy, they will be encouraged to share those pieces of content with other people on those social platforms, and that greatly impacts the visibility of your site.

Below are some tips to use for marketing your content on social media:

• Post useful materials that will help you gain traction and increase the reach of your content
• Place a call-to-action where your viewers can see them
• The quality of your content also matters a lot.

Does Google consider social media as a ranking factor?

We cannot completely say no to this question because social media can also be used to drive traffic. Hence, we can say it is indirectly an SEO element.

Some social media that you can use for SEO

• Medium
• Pinterest
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Quora
• Great hackers
• Youtube
• Reddit
• Instagram

7 Corrections to Make When Using Social Media to Boost SEO

1. Make your content easy for your readers to share on social media

Reaching more people helps you grow your brand and so you need to find ways of making your content easier to share. If your followers find it difficult to share your message, then you have to ensure that your content has the elements that make it

easy for them to share. 

Here are some elements you need to put in place:

• Make compelling captions and headlines
• Use visuals that are attractive and appealing
• Put social share buttons where they can be seen
• Ensure that the content you are giving out is useful to your target audience
• Use a call-to-action.

2. Enhance your images for SEO

Visuals are important for any written form of communication because it not only makes it easier for your readers, but it also paints a clear picture of what you are saying in the minds of your readers. So you have to optimize your images and visuals for your SEO and social media.

Here are some steps you can use in enhancing your images

• Select the appropriate frame format to enhance your site speed
• Use keywords to create compelling captions
• Ensure you have responsive images in order to reduce load time.

3. Make compelling social media post captions

Storytelling is very essential in making good content; when you tell stories, it helps in keeping your readers engaged and interested in whatever content you are giving out to them. Thus, you have to make your post captions compelling enough to make your readers click on them.

Also, you should use related hashtags that people are interested in to strengthen the relevance of your content.

4. Properly check your social media marketing operations

You would be harming your business if you do not measure your social media activities, hence you need to find ways you can use to quantify and grade the performance of your marketing activities on social media.

Here are some evaluations you can make to know if your social media marketing operations are paying off:

• Do you feel the amount of time you spent on social media has amounted to nothing?
• Are you recording losses?
• Are your social media activities making you profits?
• What marketing tactics do you need to improve on or avoid?

By using these measures to analyze your marketing decisions and activities, you will be able to know if you are making progress or not. If you realize that you are not making any progress, then you need to start setting attainable goals that you can reach using social media.

5. Maintain relationships through repeated conversations

When your customers feel that you have an interest in their struggles, questions, or problems, it will build a stronger relationship between you and them – you have to study your targeted audience and potential buyers to find out their needs and problems, so you can solve them.

An effective way you can do this is by constantly engaging in conversations with them using newsletters or post’s feedback.

Here are some tips you can use to know your audience better:

• Ask for their opinions about a blog post you made
• Ask important questions to know what they think about your brand or site
• Create a poll that will decide what your audience wants to see next.

6. Work on improving your social media profiles

When your audience finds your content engaging and valuable to them, the first thing they will see before reaching you is your social media profiles. You need to make your profile descriptive and compelling in order to create a good impression of your site or brand.

7. Build-out high-quality content

Search engines and bots no longer focus totally on the headline or keywords on your post but rather on user intent and the relevance of your content. Thus, you need to focus on quality rather than the quantity of your content.

Most content creators are in such a hurry to publish a post every single day but that is something you need to avoid; you have to place quality over quantity in your mind while delivering content.

Conclusion

If you read this post up to this point, then I believe you now have a much better understanding of how social media can be used to boost your SEO. Hence, you should ensure you use the steps here towards making your activities productive.

There are lots of benefits social media can offer to marketers, brands, and site owners; all you have to do is look through this article and find effective ways to use them to your advantage.

Make sure that you create an autoresponder to collect all this new traffic to your website with subscribers.

Enjoy the journey. Wishing you great success.

I hope this has helped, please leave a comment, like, and share. Thank you.

Tell me about tricks you have used with Social Media to improve your SEO.

LILY