Having more inbound links is a major factor in SEO, but does it mean more to have your social media profile rank highly in search rankings, or to link your website through your social media? With thousands of links being shared, you want to make sure yours are making an measurable impact. Today's video discusses what SEO for social media really means, and how to manage your social media presence to optimize your presence on the web.
TRANSCRIPTION:
Hello, and welcome to our video today. What we're going to be talking about, SEO for social media. I'm Chad Hill, and I have Adam Stetzer with me as well.
Good afternoon, Chad. We're diving into this question, how to use SEO for social media rankings. And it's a good one. People like buzz words. We hear this on the phones and in our forums all the time, in our reseller community. I want SEO. I want social. I want to SEO my social. I want to social my SEO. It's easy to throw these things around, but sometimes you have to step back and be like, what does that really mean? So let's start with that. When people want SEO for social media, Chad, what do you think they're asking for?
Well, I think we have a difference of opinion on this one. But I think ranking your social media profile means that someone wants to have their social media profile come up when they search their name. So for example, if they search your business name, like Semify, they want to see in the search results page for Semify not only their main website, but also their Facebook page, their Twitter page, any other social media platforms that they're SEOing.
Yeah, that's interesting. I would call that more reputation management, because when those things come up, it's usually in response to a search on their company name or branded name. Now, what you're saying is excellent. And I think every company should be doing some level of reputation management, which means, first and foremost, claim all those platforms. Make sure you have a presence on social media for SEO. Secondly, make sure you don't just have a presence and the lights are on; you're doing something interesting. And then lastly, to get those rankings on your branded term, you probably have to engage in SEO for social media profiles. So I see where you came at this from, Chad. And it makes some sense. And probably have to do some promotion, like building content, marketing, and really get social media rankings.
But I interpreted this completely different. I saw this and thought, no, this is people trying to harness social media for SEO of their main property. So I took it mean, well, I'm trying to get social media rankings, same as every day. And I've got my main website. And so how can I use social media to accelerate or attract backlinks or spread content marketing? We've talked about that many times too, Chad. And that's pretty successful, right?
Yeah, absolutely. And so if you do come at it from that angle, then you're absolutely right. Social media is a great way to amplify or at least to let people know about the different things that you're creating, the content you're creating, and try to get people to share that information. Because we know that if you create great content, and then use social media to share and spread that great content that you're creating, you're more likely to not only get an audience value from that, but some of that audience might have blogs or they might have other social media platforms that they use, and they'll link back to your website, which has that secondary impact of hopefully giving you better social media rankings.
Right. So some people will interpret that to say, oh, SEO for social media, you're saying there's actually social media signals in the algorithm for the search engines. And if you do that, Google will actually see that and rank you more highly. But I don't think that's really what you're saying. It sounds more subtle.
To me, I interpret having great social media presence and followers, and people in your circles, and fans of your pages like having a big email list. These are people that have kind of pre-qualified you and said, you're interesting to me. What you say I generally like and will want to explore, and then may link back to or share myself. So just like it's very good hygiene to always have a good email list building mechanism, you want to be running that so that you can blast out to those people, hey, this is really interesting, you should think of your Twitter followers and your people on Google+ and your Facebook fans in the same way.
And that's, in essence, how you would then use social media to push out excellent content to an audience that's already primed to like it, because they've been pre-selected. Versus if you're trying to just do SEO from scratch with no social media component, it's very hard to do that. So no, even if the social signals were zero, weren't in the algorithm, I'd say this strategy is still very, very successful for how to make your content marketing help your SEO for social media.