Building A Social Media Strategy Around SEO Is Smart Business Practice

By building a social media strategy around Search Engine Optimization (SEO) you are connecting what you do to what you offer, building a story that search engines can understand. Your website and/or social media efforts are like a book and the more chapters that you add to the story—concisely and on a consistent basis—will help to increase your search results with Google.

This is because Google, and other search engines, index searches with the help of a complex algorithm. While Google (and the like) does not disclose what’s included in the algorithm there are a few factors that are share. For example, if a user types in “History of Red Ribbon Week” and you happened to write a blog post about that holiday it's likely your page will appear in the top search results or the first page of Google, because your key terms match those that the user typed in. But it’s not that simple. Search engine algorithms also place weight on time, so those posted in the past 24 hours will likely appear first.

The search engine algorithm also considers relevance, and does this by the number of clicks, which is while you see some recipes or news stories appearing from some sites over others, this is because these posts have had the most interactions and clicks. Simply put, the more people to click on your post that post becomes more relevant in the eyes of Google (and the like). So if only three people click on your post it's not as relevant than the post that received 300 clicks.

This is why blogging and social media are so important. The more you talk about your brand in a consistent way the more you can build a story for Google to understand and increase your search results.

Here’s a few pointers to get you started:

1) Consider 12 things you want your business to be known for and write them down.

2) If you have Google Analytics, run a keywords report and look at the words people are currently typing into search engines to find your website.

3) Using the words you located in steps 1 + 2 consider which make sense for your company to talk about or connect to what you do. For example, Peak And Pine helps companies grow through social media and online marketing. So by talking about growth, social media, and online marketing efforts we’re helping search engines understand what it is Peak and Pine offers.

4) We also suggest using the words identified in step 3 to fuel your Editorial Calendar. Using Peak and Pine again as an example, if we use words like Growth as a main subject area, we could focus all of our conversations and imagery for a month or quarter around this topic, honing our conversation and creating a story search engines understand. This also helps you to ensure what you're brand posts always connects back to what you do, giving your content more purpose.