Learn how to connect your SEO and social media strategies to boost discoverability, drive traffic and create content that resonates. Social media SEO is a hot topic right now, as it should be. Conversations around search engines and social media marketing have been happening for years, and it’s about time social media and SEO unite. Social media SEO is the process of optimizing your social media profiles and posts to better attract potential customers through search.
SEO best practices will vary across platforms, but will involve tactics like the ones below. The goal of social media SEO is largely the same as that of Google SEO. You find the right audience for your brand and provide them with the value they’re looking for, be it content or products. Most recently, articles like this one in Forbes described Google indexing social media as a “game changer, but this left me rather confused, because I’ve worked in SEO for over a decade, and social media ranking in Google SERPs is nothing new.
I remember Ofuonyebi and I chatting about this social media ranking success on LinkedIn, her chiming in from a copywriting perspective, and me from an SEO perspective. She says, “Regardless, whether this is new to your region or not, this is your second sign to start taking social SEO seriously your first sign being when content on TikTok started being indexed by the likes of Google a couple of years ago. If you’re posting on social media, posts might as well have an SEO angle or keyword consideration. Later, I cover the social media strategies for search engine and social media marketing success.
SEO management involves improving your website’s content and visibility in search engine results pages, and recently, AI search, such as LLMs like ChatGPT. It’s about optimizing content so that people searching for relevant keywords, questions, or topics can find your site organically. These days, I want to see less about the “Social Media versus SEO debate and more about the intersection of social media and SEO. In marketing teams, I see an uncertainty about who manages search marketing on social media.
Because search on social media involves keywords, the pressure seems to be mounting on the shoulders of SEO professionals, who already have an ever-growing and broad role encompassing on-page SEO, backlinks, PR, and website optimizations that span technical, content, and user experience. Plus, there’s the fast-growing “SEO for LLMs. SEO specialists can’t be expected to take on search optimizations for every single channel. Collaboration with social media teams is essential.
The future of SEO requires teams to work together if brands want to remain competitive in this evolving search landscape. Simply put, the search landscape is becoming too large for one person to manage alone. There are multiple channels with their own algorithms and nuances, and you can’t expect any one person to master all of them in the detail required to do search well. In my experience, many brands are aware of the importance of social media and SEO.
They ask me about it, and I push for collaborative approaches. As an SEO, I can provide significant value to social media through data. My SEO research identifies the queries audiences want answered and the information they’re looking for when they’re searching. With this data, social media teams can curate a social media strategy that aligns with SEO and meets audience needs.
For years, I’ve been advocating for more holistic marketing and stronger collaboration between SEO and social teams. But in many cases, it still feels like there’s a disconnect. What can happen is that social media teams often ask for keywords and ideas, yet rarely integrate them in a way that supports shared goals. I’d love to see this change because the most forward-thinking social media managers already understand the value of integrating search and social.
When these teams collaborate well, the results are truly powerful. Danielle Shein strongly agrees with this and adds more, “People search how they speak. And with voice-to-text search features, they’re literally in conversation with their ChatGPT. If your content is conversational like that, you’re going to start playing the SEO game.
SEO tools for traditional keyword research, which aim to rank on Google, use historical data. SEO specialists then use that data to forecast the likelihood of that keyword trend remaining. With this information, social media can “borrow SEO’s findings. Ecommerce stores selling suitable coats should start posting about them before the spike.
This way, social media is proactive and provides the audience with what they need before they’ve the time to search for it themselves and potentially find a competitor. I’ve mentioned this above, but the bio is a critical SEO placement, so I wanted to highlight it to make it stand out. It was also a point that many of the SEO and social media experts that I spoke to mentioned. Danielle Shein is a brilliant social media marketer.
I know because I’ve worked with her long-term with a mutual client. She has always had astute awareness of the role of SEO and collaborative marketing efforts. I always appreciated Shein’s updates and tags in messages and emails because she recognized the cross-channel opportunity. Shein says, “Your bio is prime digital real estate.
While we all know we need to treat it like a business card, it’s also a great SEO magnet. Now that we understand social media SEO strategies in theory, let’s explore how they work in practice and how popular brands implement them. This approach is a great example of how to maintain good engagement, attract new followers, foster a positive reputation, and ultimately enhance social media SEO. Also, you’ll notice Ahrefs often shares or reposts creators’ posts on their LinkedIn.
And what’s the purpose of this action? They improve their social media SEO and credibility by showing a strong connection with the creators. I just know that you know you should be doing social media SEO better, but time is running out for thinking about it. Whether social media has been a part of your SEO strategy or not, hopefully, you have gained a stronger understanding of how to effectively link the two. The content and product already exist.
Now, it’s up to you to implement these tips by working across teams and collaborating effectively. Leverage the space to boost SEO strategically by using social media to connect with your target audience, drive organic traffic to your website and ultimately improve your conversion rates. A social media SEO strategy can help your business build deeper relationships with customers, optimize your content to appear higher in search engine results pages (SERP), and help you better reach your audience where they spend the most time. Here’s everything you need to know to implement a successful social media SEO strategy.
Social media and SEO integration make perfect sense. A social media SEO strategy can help your business build deeper relationships with customers, optimize your content to appear higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) and on social, and help you better reach your audience where they spend the most time. Sharing SEO content on social media will help you drive traffic and build on your existing optimizations. In theory, this can help you rank higher in less time.
For brands, this is a clear signal to start treating social media SEO not as an add-on, but as a real opportunity to drive traffic to their sites and build it into the core of their funnel. SEO can be an essential pillar within your social media marketing strategy, just as social media can directly impact your SEO. That’s why SEO alone isn’t enough you also need social media, and you can apply similar SEO practices to your social media management to make your content more “findable. SEO best practices will differ across the many social media platforms, but doing this can help your content appear more prominently in search results on social platforms, which in turn helps you gain followers, increase your engagement rate, and drive more organic traffic.
Your site must be fast, user-friendly, and ready to handle any amount of traffic your SEO efforts bring in. Using social accounts to promote new pieces of SEO content can be a significant driver of new engagement that overall impacts a website’s authority to Google, and boosts traffic to these webpages. So, by really focusing on fleshing out those short little bylines or bios you add to the beginning or end of your blog posts, you’ll be able to enhance SEO performance. As social media and search engines are frequently used in the same web sessions, both traditional SEO and social SEO are important components of your overall social SEO strategy.
Here's more on why social media is important for SEO and how to implement a successful social SEO strategy. These metrics aren’t direct ranking factors; however, they can increase visibility to drive more traffic (and traffic is a direct ranking factor). While SEO and social media management have some nuances and differentiation, mainly in how the platforms themselves work and their functions, social media and SEO work best when they’re aligned, and this is particularly evident now because people use social media as a search engine. Meanwhile, social media can amplify your SEO efforts by driving traffic to your website and strengthening brand recognition and authority.
Social media traffic is mobile-heavy, so an uptick in mobile users indicates your social media and SEO integration is paying off.
