SMM in SEO is an important aspect of digital marketing. Social media marketing strategy can play a big part in enhancing the search engine optimization strategy for a brand.
You can insert your target keywords in your social media content to attract the right market to your profile. Additionally, using the right target keywords on your content can potentially land you on search engine result pages.
You can then insert links to your website on your profile so that when people are interested, they can learn more about you through your website.
Furthermore, you can increase brand awareness through social media marketing. This allows you to potentially connect with more people in your industry or niche. Once you establish a relationship with them, it opens up the opportunity for you to ask them if they are interested in you blogging as a guest.
Guest blogging is the process of publishing articles or content on someone else’s website. You take care of creating content for them and in exchange, you can insert your link in the article you wrote for them. This gives you a high-quality backlink from a reputable website.
But, to fully understand and appreciate how these 2 social media marketing strategies work together, let’s discuss each of them more in depth.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization, the process of improving parts of your website so it appeals better to search engines. SEO can help you rank higher on search engine result pages, or SERPs.
According to statistics, there is a 39.8 % click-through rate of the first organic result in SERPs. Organic results are the unpaid listings that typically show up below paid listings. The second organic result response drops to only 18.7% and the third result has only a 10.2% click-through rate.
Keeping your company in the top search results is why SEO is important if you want to grow your website. It offers a long-term solution to attracting the right target market to your website.
Important Parts of SEO
If you want to create an effective SEO strategy, you’ll need to be familiar with these basic parts of SEO. These will serve as the foundation of your overall strategy.
Keyword Research
This is one of the most important parts of SEO. Your keywords are going to be all over your website so you must have a solid understanding of what they are.
Keywords are ideas, topics, phrases, or just, as the name suggests, words, that users type into search engines to look for what they need. On your end, these are the words you’ll sprinkle on your website to attract users that are interested in ideas and topics related to your brand.
To identify which keywords you should target, use a keyword research tool like Ahrefs and SEMRush. These are two of the most reliable and popular keyword research tools in the industry.
Make sure that you target keywords that are relevant to your niche. Your keywords have to be a combination of high search volume keywords and long tail keywords.
High search volume keywords mean that a lot of users are looking for these keywords. Unfortunately, since they’re very popular, there is a high chance that other brands are also targeting these keywords. As a result, there is usually high competition for these keywords, therefore, making it hard to rank high when using such keywords.
Long tail keywords are usually very specific and much longer than the average keywords. The users who are looking for these keywords usually already have something specific in mind. There may be low search volume for these keywords but at least the users looking for them are close to taking action when they find what they’re looking for.
Finally, don’t force your keywords on your content, and don’t spam them by repeatedly mentioning them or using them. This is keyword stuffing and it will cause you more harm than good. Google sees this as an attempt to influence the ranking algorithm so it punishes any website that does it.
Content
Your content is also an equally important part of your SEO strategy. When you create content, your aim is to bring value and help people answer their questions as quickly and easily as possible. Don’t be outwardly promotional when you’re creating content. People can quickly lose interest if all you do is talk about the products or services that you offer.
Instead, create content that people look out for because they trust your expertise. Consistently creating high-quality, helpful, and reliable content will increase your industry authority. As you slowly build your reputation, more and more people will go to your website to find what they’re looking for.
Page Title and Meta Description
Your page title is the title that users see when your web page appears on SERPs. It gives users a general idea of what the web page is about.
It’s important to keep it under 60 characters so users can see all of it. If your page title is too long, it’s going to appear cropped with a … at the end.
As for the meta description, this is a short snippet of what your content is all about. It gives users an idea of what they’ll encounter when they click on your link.
Keep your meta description short, precise, and impactful. Make sure that you keep it under 160 characters so users can see all of it on SERPs. Very long meta descriptions are usually ignored by users.
You must try to include your keywords in the page title and the meta description because it will help search engines better match you with your target audience. Remember to incorporate them as naturally as possible! Search engines can easily identify spammy techniques to rank higher on SERPs. This can lead to penalties that can significantly hurt your ranking.
URL Structure
When it comes to URL structure, a good rule of thumb to follow is to look at it from the perspective of users. Is it easy to understand? As for search engines, your URL structure should help them understand what your web page is all about. Make sure you include your keywords in this area as well.
Format
Your content must be properly formatted for both users and search engines to easily understand what it’s about. Your main heading must be formatted as H1, the headings are H2, the subheadings are H3, and so forth. Don’t forget to incorporate your keywords on your headings as well.
Internal Links and Backlinks
Internal linking refers to the process of linking your content to your other content. For example, you can connect your blog posts to each other so that users can continue learning about relevant topics.
This helps users find relevant information easily and quickly. This encourages users to spend more time browsing through your website. You will have better chances of ranking high when search engines see that users are spending time on your website.
As for search engines, internal linking helps them crawl and understand your website as a whole. The links that lead to each other give the crawlers a more complete picture of what your website is about.
Backlinks are the opposite of internal links. Instead of linking your web pages to your other web pages, backlinks link to web pages outside of your website. Link building is the process of acquiring these backlinks from other websites to your own.
Backlinks are important because they are like votes of approval from other websites. They are testimonies that your website is valuable, reliable, and worth mentioning in their content. This helps you rank better on SERPs because search engines will see your content as trustworthy and valuable based on support from other websites.
In building your backlink profile, make sure that it doesn’t come from only one source. This is where pillow link building comes in. It helps you diversify your backlink profile so it looks much more natural to search engines.
Additionally, make sure that you avoid unnatural links. These are links that come from low-quality websites and use spammy techniques to increase your backlinks. Use of these can cause your web pages to get penalized with lower ranking or being removed entirely in SERPs.
Alternate Text
Alternate texts can also be called alt tags and alt descriptions. These are written copy that appears when an image on a webpage fails to load on a user’s screen. So, if you had a picture of a person at an office, facing a computer, your alt text might say, “Person and computer in office setting”. It helps people get a general sense of what the image is, even if it doesn’t load. This also helps screen-reading tools describe images to visually impaired users.
Finally, search engines use these texts to better understand, crawl, and rank your website accordingly. That’s why it’s important to still include your keywords when you’re writing alt text.
Page Speed
The loading speed of your website is an important factor for search engines in ranking you because users will immediately bounce if a web page loads too slowly.
Bounce is the term used to describe the phenomenon when users visit a web page and immediately leave without doing anything else. Google doesn’t look kindly at websites with a high bounce rate because it means that users leave without finding the information they need.
According to statistics, the probability of users bouncing from your web page increases to 32% if your page loads for 1 to 3 seconds. This shows how extremely important it is to prioritize speeding up your website. Here are a few tips to do so:
- Compress your website with Gzip
- Use a content delivery network
- Use a caching plugin
- Reduce redirects
- Fix broken links
- Compress images
After applying the changes, go ahead and test out the speed of your website. Go to PageSpeed Insights to assess your website’s speed and get suggestions as to how you can improve it.
Mobile Optimization
There are 5.03 billion mobile internet users as of July 2022. This is an extremely large market and you’ll be missing out on so much if your website is not suited to them.
Optimizing for mobile means that you have to make sure that your website looks good and responds well on small screens like phones and tablets.
Since it’s being shown on a smaller screen, the layout of the website must change to accommodate that. It has to adjust accordingly so that users can still easily read and navigate their way around.
Additionally, your call-to-action buttons must be responsive to users. Remember to design your layout for large fingers. Not all users have small fingers for tapping on small buttons. Your goal is to make sure that users (and especially mobile users) take minimal steps in doing what they have to do to understand or navigate your website.
What is SMM?
SMM stands for social media marketing. It’s the process of utilizing different social media platforms in building an online presence. This helps build brand awareness, increase sales, and drive traffic to your website.
Additionally, it also helps you create and nourish a relationship with your target audience. Social media platforms are created to connect people after all so it’s the perfect place for you to get to know your target audience. This helps create trust and understanding between you and your audience.
SMM can be quite complicated because each social media platform caters to very specific users. As a result, brands also have to strategically play into the rules of each platform. Your strategy on Facebook, which tends to have an older audience, will be different than your strategy on Instagram, where users are younger and more cosmopolitan. Brands also need to know effective strategies that will help them garner a bigger audience and better connect with them at the same time.
How to Market on Different Social Media Platforms
Let’s go over some of the most famous platforms to market on and discuss how you can effectively market your brand in each. This will help you maximize each platform to its full potential.
Facebook is currently the largest social media platform in the world. As of the third quarter of 2022, there are 2.96 billion monthly active Facebook users. The platform surpassed the two billion mark in the second quarter of 2017.
Facebook is also popular with a wide variety of demographics. It’s also extremely easy to share content with family and friends on this platform: with the right content, you can easily go viral. This makes Facebook one of the best social media platforms on which to advertise and market your brand.
Fortunately, Facebook has lots of options for media and advertisements so it’s relatively flexible when it comes to marketing strategies. You can create blog posts, images, videos, and many more brand representations with Facebook.
Instagram is the 4th-most-used social media platform on the internet. It has 1.5 billion daily active global users. Instagram mainly focuses on photos and videos. It’s an ideal platform for brands that have products and services that can be presented in a highly visual manner.
Long captions are allowed but precise and direct-to-the-point ones are preferable. If you have a lot of information to share, it’s better if you do so in a photo or video. You can then add a link to your website in the caption of the photo if your audience wants to learn more.
YouTube
In 2022, YouTube ranks as the most visited website in the world. It has a monthly search traffic of 8.1 million. YouTube focuses on videos. You can create long-form content here as long as it’s in a video format. This platform is a great place to create content that can be entertaining and educational.
In advertising on YouTube, you have to make sure that you’re creating high-definition videos that add value to your customers. This can be in the form of information or entertainment.
Make sure that you also try your best to appeal to the emotions of your viewers. If you’re able to make them feel something or inspire them to take action, there’s a higher chance that they’ll share your videos on other social media platforms.
Most users see LinkedIn as generally a platform for looking for jobs. But more and more professionals are starting to treat it as a social media platform. They’re posting their opinions, thoughts, blog posts, and achievements. As a result, it’s the perfect place to market your brand if your target market is professionals or other companies so it’s perfect for B2B (business-to-business) campaigns.
To advertise on LinkedIn, you can create blog posts that offer valuable information to your audience. It can be news, updates, or trends that are relevant to your industry or niche.
You can also connect with experts and industry leaders by discussing with them in their blog posts. You can reach out to other professionals and establish relationships with them before introducing your brand.
TikTok
This is one of the newest social media platforms on the internet and it’s gaining a lot of traffic so far. This is owned by a Beijing-based tech company named ByteDance. It was launched in 2017 and it quickly garnered global popularity in 2018.
In 2021, this social media platform’s global number of first-time installs reached over 740 million. In the same year, the app had approximately 86.9 million users in the United States. This is projected to increase to around 94 million users in 2022.
TikTok is a video-dominated social media platform. Current updates have allowed users to post slideshows of their photos but videos still reign supreme over the platform.
In marketing in TikTok, you’ll need to be aware of what trends are currently circulating on the platform. You’ll need to use appropriate sounds or music to go with your video. You can also come up with trendy dances that can potentially go viral if they’re catchy enough. This will help in increasing brand awareness and get people to talk about you and your brand.
FAQs
1. Which is more effective, SEO or SMM?
SEO and SMM are two very different forms of digital marketing. You don’t need to worry about which is more important because they are actually better when done together. When used properly, these two digital marketing strategies will give you a more solid online presence.
2. Can I create content that can be used for both strategies?
This depends more on what social media platform you’ll be posting content on. If your blog post for SEO will be long-form content, it may not work as effectively on Instagram compared to posting it on LinkedIn. A safe form of content that you can post for both SEO and SMM is images, infographics, photos, and videos.
3. Are these digital marketing strategies cost-effective?
They are considered cost-effective because you don’t really have to pay for anything to join social media platforms. You also don’t have to pay to rank high on search engine result pages because that happens organically.
Utilizing SMM in SEO Effectively
Social media platforms are extremely effective in bridging together people and helping them connect better with one another. It’s also the perfect opportunity for you to connect with your target audience and build a relationship with them. This helps increase brand awareness, trust, and reputation.
SEO is focused on optimizing your content so that it would rank higher on SERPs. This will help direct more organic traffic to your website. It’s a long-term strategy that can reap benefits for years and years.
Using both of these digital marketing strategies will help you create a very solid online presence. More people will start talking about you on social media which gives you the opportunity to tell them more about who you are. Once they’re interested, they can learn more about you on your website. This becomes another source of organic traffic that will help your website grow.
