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20 Effective Ways to Boost Search Rank with Social Media

Posted on by in Social Media

If there is something that businesses want to gain most from their websites, it is to have those websites rank higher on search engines. It isn’t surprising why. The more visible you are online, the more people know about you. There are several ways to do this from keyword optimization to paid advertisements. But a lot of businesses often ignore one channel that is now considered as a useful tool for gaining leverage on search engines – social media.

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There are several ways through which you can have a high search rank by using social media. Here is a list of 20 of the most effective –

1. Understand the Relationship between Social Media and Search Engines

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If your business has a social media profile and is popular enough it will appear on search results. In fact, channels like LinkedIn and Twitter are becoming popular for searchable content.

2. Get People to Do What You Want Them to

The attention span of a typical web user is almost the same as a goldfish’s. People only log onto the web to find interesting content. If nothing catches their eye, they move on. One of the best ways to get people to engage with your social media content is to use call to action phrases. Search for clickable keywords on social media and see for yourself.

3. Use Call to Action Wisely

Words and phrases like retweet, like or follow have the most clicks especially if they accompany content that you want people to watch. Use call to action phrases at appropriate times to flag visitors and give them a reason to start clicking.

4. Encourage Visitors to Click

A call to action on your social media page might help you get your audience’s attention, but it might not necessarily make them click on your links. Yes, phrases like “follow” or “share” are good but remember, people don’t want you to sell to them. What they want is content that is actually useful. The more useful the content, the more click throughs you get. And the more the click throughs, the higher will be your search ranking. A great way to do this is to mention both their problem and the solution which you offer in the copy on your social media posts.

5. Optimize Your Profile

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We can all agree that relevant keywords are essential for any online marketing strategy. But most of us are guilty of skipping this step for our social media profiles. Don’t let your profile go to waste with humdrum content. Make the content work for you by adding keywords that everyone is using to search.

6. Use Keywords

We just discussed how your social media posts can end up on search engines if they have relevant content. Use your profile information to achieve the same result. Use SEO keywords on everything from the bios to the headlines of your social media profiles and see you search rank soar. There are several ways you can do this as discussed below.

7. Use Keywords to Drive Your Content

Leveraging popular keywords in your social media content strategy is a great way to boost your rankings. Unfortunately, most businesses often forget what it is that they are ranking for – conversions. Remember, the basic goal of keywords is to ensure that visitors land on your pages, not your competition’s. Here is an example. Let’s say that you own a restaurant. Use content that matches queries that are related to your expertise. For instance, if your website has a recipe for meatloaf, use popular search queries like “How to cook the perfect meatloaf” and post it on social media.

8. Keep the Word Count Low

At this point, we can all agree that content is still king especially when it comes to social media. However, it is also important to remember how people use social media. They use it to keep up with current happenings and do it fast. So, keep the word count in your social media posts minimal. Look to Twitter for inspiration which limits tweets to 140 characters and keep this in mind for other social media posts.

9. Use Images

Keeping the content of your social media posts minimal increases visibility. Posting it with engaging content like images will even more so. Make sure that you high quality images in your post especially if you sell products. You don’t need to go out and buy a DSLR to do that. The high res camera in a smartphone works just as well.

10. Make Social Sharing Easy

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Nearly everyone has a social media account, and not only on Facebook. The trend is taking over online interactions and platforms like Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Snapchat are prime source for these interactions. Your content can reach thousands of prospects for free if you get people to share it on these social media platforms. Provided that your content is good, you can even get people who recommend it on these resources and get backlinks which increase rank.

11. Make High Quality Content a Priority

Selling your business might be a priority right now but you also have to sell your content. As we discussed, people love posts that interest them. Google loves quality content too. And so do other search engines.

12. Metadata is Your Friend

Author bios might seem like something you describe yourself with but for social media platforms like Google+, they are an important source of metadata. On the web, it defines you as a thought leader in your niche which improves your search ranking and adds a face to your work.

13. Increase Followers

The more followers you have for your social media profile, the more people will like, tweet or share your content. This will get more people to do the same which can increase your search rank.

14. Avoid Broken Links

No one likes to click on a link and end up on a 404 page. Broken links might make you look unprofessional and certainly won’t make people stick around for long or recommend your pages to anyone else. Your search rank might drop as a result so make sure you fix those links fast.

15. Measure Social Media Performance

Monitoring SEO performance on social media channels is a major part of your campaign. How will you know whether your social media marketing strategies are working otherwise?

16. Use the Right Tools

Unfortunately, when it comes to social media performance, most marketers end up measuring the wrong things. And their search rank suffers as a result. The trick to getting this process right is to focus on using the right tools. Case in point is Google Analytics that tracks the traffic from your social media accounts.

17. Improve Local Optimization

One of the most convenient aspects of social media is that it makes it easier for businesses to engage with their local communities and use it to create locally optimized content. Posts that are about current events get the most exposure on the web while local posts are great for local SEO.

18. Increase Brand Awareness

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Make sure that you engage with followers consistently. The tips mentioned above give you several ways to do so. The more people know about your brand on social media, the more popular it becomes. In time, your posts will also be able to rank for non branded keywords which will help expand your audience.

19. Use Content Besides Text

SEO optimized text isn’t only what can get your social posts to rank high on search results. Now, you can get the same value with other forms of content like infographics, images and videos.

20. Be Creative

Don’t be afraid to add a touch of creativity to your posts. Creative elements make your content more relatable for audiences and make it stand out from other social media posts.

If businesses hope to be visible on the web, they can’t afford to ignore social media. These tips will help you get started.

Author: Terry Wilson

Terry Wilson is a team lead of social media marketing executives in a company. He is a most senior individual in our team. Currently, he is developing new trends report for our team to follow. During making a research report, he took lots of information about social media advertising from Cygnis Media and some other channels.

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