Optimizing Your Social Media Profiles to Improve SEO

Up until just a few years ago, people were only using search engines like Google and Bing to find the answers. Nowadays, in addition to those search engines, people are using social media channels to search. Search isn’t only happening on the traditional platforms anymore, so it’s important to optimize your own social media profiles in order to be found through all of the different platforms people are searching on.

Social media accounts may not directly influence your search ranking with Google because Google crawls and indexes social media profiles, but does not account for the number of likes, followers, or shares that the profile has. If these factors affected your SERP ranking, it would make it far too easy for someone with an undeserving site to rank higher than others on the search results page.

Social media plays an indirect role in helping people find brands in search engine results. The content that people share on social profiles can help gain more exposure and boost organic traffic on your website.

Why should you optimize your social media?

If the content that you post on social media is optimized and relevant enough to a search, it will get crawled by the search spiders and indexed to appear on the results page just as a traditional webpage would be. For example, if you search for any celebrity right now, you will see that the top results are their social media profiles. Optimizing social media helps increase the amount of organic (natural search) traffic, rather than having to pay for traffic through ads.

The way that sites rank on search engines is known as your “domain authority.” Every website has a score from one to 100, and this score is looked at when search engines decide the order of search results. If you have a higher score than your competitors, you will likely appear higher on the search results page than their site. However, authority doesn’t grow overnight, as domain age is factors into this score.

Consistently publishing content that is relevant to your audience will help this process move along. The more relevant that content is, the more it will be shared and backlinks will increase– which give positive votes towards your authority. Content can be distributed on social media, and there are obvious benefits from shares on LinkedIn, Twitter, or other social channels where your link can actually be posted. Social channels have a lot of leverage on your search engine ranking because those websites have high domain authority already. A backlink that comes from a site with a high domain authority can go a long way for domain ranking.

How do you optimize your social media for SEO?

Now that you know that social media only helps indirectly with the search engine factor, here a few ways to optimize it:

1. Quality links: As explained before, backlinks are an important part of any SEO strategy. Both quality and quantity of external links will help sites rank higher. Successful sites focus their content strategy on social media, they can likely get the right people to share the content because social media is targeted towards the ideal audience. Although a brand’s fans are quality links and mentions toward the brand, influencers with a lot of followers can go a long way.
2. Social sharing: Content strategies should revolve around content that people are likely to engage with, whether it’s because it’s educational, entertaining, or timely. It’s important to also keep in mind the sales funnel. For example, if you are focusing on the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey, post engaging and educational content like videos, infographics, and how-to’s. To drive conversions, provide a lead magnet, like a downloadable ebook, contests, and coupon codes.
3. Social profiles: It is important for brands to have consistency across all channels. Here are a few things you should focus on:
   1. Vanity url: This is the URL for a social media profile; for example, www.facebook.com/YourSocialMediaProfileName. URLS are heavily weighted by search engines, so have it include the brand name. This will also create trust in your URL, rather than just having a skew of characters with not identification of what the link really is.
      
   2. Use keywords: Just like websites, keywords are important on social media channels for on-site seo. Pay attention to places where you can use the keywords that you are targeting. For example, on Facebook, you could optimize the about section and your page’s description since these are areas Google will pull from when generating your page’s meta title and description on the search results page.
   3. Page updates: Remember the first part of a post’s caption might serve as a meta description if the post appears as a Google search result, so take advantage of this by writing strong leads for every post.
4. Optimize your social media images: People are more likely to engage when they see something that is visually appealing. Therefore, always use the correct dimensions for social media posts. It will look more attractive and people will be more inclined to click it.
5. Searches: Videos, infographics, articles, or any other social posts should have a common goal to capture people’s attention. Pull people in with great imagery, an engaging title or headline, or infuse keywords that people are searching for. For example, if you made an article about SEO best practices, you should frame the headline around the question the audience will be searching for, such as “how to improve my website’s SEO.” A colorful, high-quality image wouldn’t be a bad idea either.

Hopefully after reading this article you see the importance of implementing an SEO strategy into your social media. This can help you increase your number of impressions and even your site traffic. Want to learn more about SEO? We put together a helpful tool, so check it out. If you have any questions at all about getting started with your SEO strategy, you know where to find the SEO experts!