According to our Tech Marketing Survey Series: Social Media in the Real World, 92% of tech companies post their own content on social media in the hopes of gaining brand awareness. An impressive goal, right? But what if tech marketers could also use their social media for more than that? What if your social strategy could help your website's SEO KPIs as well?
Spoiler: There are no "ifs." All it takes are some strategic integrations to make sure your social media content and website SEO are working in tandem. Let's dive into how to get these two tactics working together for your tech company.
Why social media and SEO work together
On the surface, social media and SEO seem like pretty different marketing strategies: the later tends to be about brand awareness (63% of our survey respondents said this was their #1 goal for social media!) and the later is usually focused on lead gen. That said, you already know that the real magic in marketing comes when you get multiple channels to work in tandem…and social media and SEO make the perfect pair!
They can help each other out by increasing the number of people talking about your brand, either if they found you by searching Google or came across a shared post on LinkedIn. Thought leadership content is often sought after in social and authority is rewarded by search engines. Social is just an extension of your content marketing and SEO is the piece of that marketing that can be woven into it.
How can you use your SEO strategy to fuel your social media strategy?
Nothing in marketing happens in a vacuum. Therefore, the SEO strategy most tech marketers have in place can extend to their social media platforms. Let’s dig into how your SEO strategy can carry over for your social media content.
Your SEO strategy most likely stems from organic keyword research where you’ve targeted a list of relevant search terms your prospects use most. Those keywords are then used to create topic clusters of content that support and build off of each other. Long-form content such as pillar pages grow appendages as relevant blogs are developed to add more information.
When you create an SEO strategy, your content marketing calendar is your vehicle for driving organic traffic back to your website. This can translate into your social media calendar as well.
Extend the work you’ve already done by including keywords and phrases in your social posts. Using your keywords as hashtags in your posts can extend your reach. Trying to break in a new branded keyword? Start by creating the hashtag on social media first before publishing long-form content on it to start gaining traction and recognition.
If your audience is the sharing type, make sure you add social sharing links to your blog posts so users who come from organic search can share them easily. If someone is willing to promote your content, let them!
How can you use your social media strategy to fuel your SEO strategy?
The obvious use of social media is to build awareness of your brand and bring in more website traffic by posting your own content such as blogs, on-demand webinars and white papers. Social media helps build brand trust, loyalty and authority…all the things that search engines are looking for!
Organically promote your content for more shares and backlinks, right now these are typically no-follow links but things are always changing and eventually, they’ll count. Plus, it gives your content a leg up instead of waiting for bot crawls. Looking for more? Pay a bit to boost your post and extend the reach.
Get in the habit of reviewing your social platforms once a week, perhaps during your Friday morning coffee. Keep an eye out for trending topics and integrate them into your content strategy as necessary. Is there a new regulation that will affect your audience? Get a blog up and out.
During this time, you can identify new keyword opportunities by monitoring how many people are talking about something on social media – this can help you identify previously overlooked keywords that may be valuable to include in your SEO strategy. Creeping on your competitors isn’t a horrible idea either, just don’t match them post for post.
Participate in social media forums to increase awareness of your brand but also new topics and content. This helps establish you as a thought leader which is important when it comes time for search engines like Google or Bing determine if they should rank your site higher than other sites when users search for particular keywords related to the topic at hand. And you're cultivating a new audience who will start looking to you for answers.
How can tech marketer turbo boost the SEO/social media dynamic duo?
Ready to take it to the next level? Let’s go!
You can use your social media platforms to drive traffic to your website, which can lead those visitors to more content and next steps. For example, if you post a blog at the awareness stage level, a visitor may click through to give it a read.
At the end of that blog, you—being your helpful self—have added a CTA to download a guide that will help the visitor in their journey for a solution and they appreciate your foresite by downloading the content. (P.S. Adding a clear next step at the end of any piece of content is a MUST. If you have blogs out there with weak or no CTAs, go take care of that ASAP!)
Or say they aren’t ready for a guide but they liked what they read and are willing to sign up for your newsletter or started following you on social media. You can nurture them further down the funnel with deeper content offers via email or paid social ads.
Their actions from here will affect their lead scoring (if you have it in place), which will make it easier for you to create personalized videos based on their behavior as well as understand what types of content they prefer, potentially causing you to tweak your content strategy to what resonates best with your most engaged prospects.
These campaigns provide valuable insight into what prospects are interested in, so when it comes time for paid advertising like PPC ads or Facebook ads (or even retargeting), there’s already an audience ready-made that matches up with those keywords and interests. Add gas onto the fire by increasing spend with these targeted campaigns until results show themselves at scale!
In the end, social media and SEO are both important elements of a successful marketing strategy. The relationship between them has become stronger and more valuable over time as each continues to evolve. Social media is now an essential part of your SEO strategy, with many businesses using it as a way to drive traffic back to their website or blog posts. In addition to this, there are many ways that you can use some of the concepts discussed above (like link building) in order to improve your search rankings!
