Creating great content is fundamental to any marketing strategy but it is not enough. That great content needs to be seen.
Social media can help your content and SEO strategy on many levels.
The next step is trying these three strategies to give it an SEO boost while exposing it on social media:
1. Find keywords that resonate with buyer pain points
In traditional SEO, you target keywords that match your products and services. For social media and SEO to work together, you have to go beyond keywords with high volume and low competition. When selecting keywords, you need to focus on the problem your customer is trying to solve. Think about the pain the buyer has that you can help relieve.
For example, let’s say you own a local HVAC company and you’re running a promotion on seasonal checkups. Your target buyer’s pain might be fear that her furnace will go out during the upcoming winter weather.
You might call your service “system analysis” and offer coupons through your Facebook page. But your customer fears having to replace a broken furnace, so she might search for “new furnace cost”, “furnace maintenance”, or “furnace replacement.”
Before you engage social media with messages about “system analysis,” use the words and phrases your target buyers are likely to search. Instead of “system analysis” company lingo, weave your customers’ words and phrases into your messaging.
A natural byproduct of this approach will be shares and links that point to your site with keywords that help boost your relevancy for the exact phrases buyers search when looking for your service.
The best way to find the kind of keywords likely to resonate with your customers is to put yourself into their mindset. Identify a customer persona and imagine you are the buyer trying to solve that particular problem.
What would you search to relieve your pain? Jot down a few ideas, and then turn to keyword tools to validate your instincts. Some free and paid keyword tools can help you:
- Google Keyword Planner
- Wordtracker
- Wordstream
- Keyword Discovery
2. Stir emotional responses with relevant content
Some people take a mechanical approach to SEO: pick keywords, sprinkle them throughout content, and make sure everything reads nicely. Unfortunately, these same folks do not think about creating meaningful content that hits the sweet spot between relevancy and usefulness that stirs reader emotions. If they did, they would likely find it’s pretty straightforward to cause audiences to react, ensuring they share the content on social media.
To stir emotional responses for your content, you must begin with empathy. Then, get into your buyers’ heads and think about how you can evoke an emotional response that connects their pain points to your solutions. For example, a study on viral content found the most shared content triggered the following top 3 emotions: awe, laughter, and amusement.
When you match search engine relevance with content that stirs emotions in prospective buyers, it leads naturally to increased shares engagement and influences SEO signals that give your content extra authority.
But this can also work the other way around: You can implement the lessons you have learned from your social media sharing in SEO and create SEO content that resonates with the audience and consequently attracts backlinks and ranks.
This is where content repackaging comes into play, i.e. an ability to adapt the same content assets to multiple channels. For example, you can turn a Youtube video into an Instagram update or turn your text article into an infographic or a video slideshow with subtitles.
Content re-packaging is a great way to turn your content into lead magnets.
3. Target influencers associated with high authority domains
If you are accustomed to social media marketing, connecting your content with influencers should be on your list of strategies. To give this technique an SEO boost, add awareness of influencers’ website authority to your radar.
One great tool for finding influencers and site authority is Buzzsumo. With it, you can search for influencers by topic and see domain and page authority alongside traditional social media metrics like number of followers. As a bonus, you can view the types of links they’ve shared to match the kind of content you produce more precisely.
SEO has evolved a great deal within a few years. It is no longer an island. SEO only works when it is integrated into everything your company is doing, including sales and web design/usability.
