Now more than ever, company marketers are charged with improving performance with fewer resources and shifting marketing budgets from traditional to digital tactics such as SEO and social media. There are significant benefits from combining search engine optimization and social media marketing tactics ranging from increased social network discovery via search to the ability to attract links for improved SEO.
Making the most out of combining SEO insights with social media marketing tactics can be accomplished with a road map that identifies the audience you’re after, the goals you’re trying to reach as well as a strategy that sets the stage for the tactics you’ll use to execute your game plan. Read on to get a better understanding of how SEO and social media complement each other and a step-by-step guide for creating a social media road map.
From a marketing standpoint, you can look at the benefits of SEO and social media two different ways.
First, implementing a social media marketing program without optimizing content is leaving money on the table. Useful social content (blog, video, images, audio) that cannot be discovered via search is a lost opportunity to reach an audience that is looking.
For example, The Student Loan Down (http://blog.wellsfargo.com/StudentLoanDown/), the popular blog about student loans and college financing from Wells Fargo, identifies 29 keywords in its keyword meta tag and doesn’t rank in Google’s first page for 26 of them. Those that do rank are variations of the blog’s name.
While there is a generous amount of cross linking within posts, a basic blog template optimization effort leveraging keywords and other minor adjustments could improve search traffic for this site substantially without any compromise in content quality or user experience.
Social interactions and media sharing amongst social network participants create the kind of content that can improve a brand’s visibility within search results through profiles, videos, blog posts or other media. A good example is Stormhoek wine’s first-page Google rankings including blogs, Facebook and Twitter.
On the flip side, implementing SEO programs without leveraging the content distribution and linking benefits of social web participation makes link building for SEO an uphill battle. The nature of the social web encourages participation: sharing, voting, commenting and linking. Popular social content gets exposure, traffic and can result in a substantial number of relevant inbound links. The famous Blendtec iPhone video has attracted more than 6,000 links resulting in a top 10 ranking on Google for the word “blender.”
However you look at it, SEO and social media work well together as long as there is a framework for doing so. In my next post I will go reveal five steps to implementing the things I have discussed today. If you have any thoughts on what I have written please feel free to leave a comment.
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