Social Media SEO Hacks for Business in 2020
If you have opened this post to read, you are in for a treat. I’m going to give you some SEO tricks that you can use against the algorithm for multiple platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, podcasting, and Google. If you’re interested in learning these secret little hacks that you can implement in your social media, then keep on reading.
If you haven’t decided on your niche yet, you would first need to read my article on choosing a profitable niche for social media in 2020.
Now, before I go ahead and spill all the secret beans on how you can rank higher in multiple social media platforms, if you are a beginner, let me just explain what SEO means.
SEO means search engine optimization, and if we’re going to be exact, on the dictionary, it says that search engine optimization is the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine.
In this article, I’m not going to be talking about website optimization. I’m going to be talking about getting your videos on YouTube to rank higher, getting your posts on Instagram to rank higher, and also getting your podcasts to rank higher.
Let’s first start off with Instagram. For Instagram, I have two SEO tricks. The first one is that for your bio name, instead of just putting your name, which is not very searchable, think of keywords that you can put on there that are related to your niche or your industry. For example, if you are a fitness coach and you’re simply putting your name in your bio section, a person who’s looking for a fitness coach will probably not be searching ‘Julie’ or ‘Daniel’ or whatever your name is. Instead in the Instagram search bar, they’re probably searching for ‘fitness coach’. That’s why it’s really helpful that in your bio name you actually put in ‘fitness coach’ or ‘fitness’ whatever, so that you’ll show up in search when someone is typing in for a fitness coach.
My second piece of advice is about utilizing Instagram alt text. Instagram alt text is a relatively new function that Instagram recently released in January 2019, and not a lot of people have actually tapped into it yet. Thankfully you’re reading this post so you can get ahead of the curve. Alt text means alternative text. What this is going to allow you to do is input keywords into your photo. When you upload a photo, hit ‘Next’, put in your caption, tags and location, simply go to ‘Advanced Settings’, which you can find at the very bottom of the page. Once you click ‘Advanced Settings’, you’ll have the option to turn off your comments and also share this post to Facebook. However, what you’ll also notice is that you can also write alt text. The alt text is going be describing the photo, and the reason why alt text is there is really for people with visual impairment. What’s going to happen is if you have alt text, then Instagram or Siri is going to read your posts out loud to that audience. At the same time, it’s also going to help you rank higher in the algorithm.
If you put keywords into your post, it’s going to really help Instagram understand what your post is all about, and whether or not your post is going to be relevant for a certain audience. For instance, let’s say my niche is in the business niche, and within my post I write things like female entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, business, social media, so on and so forth. That means that when Instagram reads that, they’re probably going to be more likely to show my post to someone who is interested in those topics. Now, keep in mind that even if you’re not putting alt text, Instagram is already doing it for you. However, I ask you, do you really trust Instagram to figure out what your post is about? Probably not! That’s why it’s going to be really worth the time and effort to include the alt text, so you get a little bit of a boost in the algorithm.
Let’s move on to the second SEO hack, and this one is for YouTube. Let me let you in on a secret. A lot of people actually don’t realize this, but the closed captions within your Youtube videos matter if you want to rank higher in the algorithm and be optimized for search. When you’re looking at people’s videos, if there is a CC icon underneath, it means that video has been closed-captioned manually. Of course when you upload a video, YouTube will automatically auto-generate captions for you. However, when YouTube does it, it doesn’t really count because YouTube is not that accurate. If you want to rank higher in search and also be favored by the algorithm, what you’d want to do is manually transcribe your videos. The reason why you want to have your videos transcribed is to allow YouTube to understand what is inside your video, along with the keywords that you might be using in your video. This is going to help you not only rank on YouTube, but also rank well in Google.
Let’s move on to podcasting. It is a lot harder to be found on podcast versus being found on YouTube or Instagram or any other platform. That’s because podcast’s search functionality is generally not that great. However, if you want to beat this, you can add keywords into your podcast’s name and also into your podcast’s description. By doing so, you will ensure that your podcast is going to have a higher chance in showing up in search if someone is looking for a specific topic or specific niche. Let’s say my podcast is called the Sana Uqaili show. I don’t have a podcast by the way, but let’s just use that as an example. My podcast with this name will probably never be found except for word of mouth. However, if my niche is in social media, business, and female entrepreneurship, then a better title for my podcast would be ‘Sana Uqaili’s Show on Social Media, Business, and Female Entrepreneurship’. That’s going to ensure that my podcast show is going to show up if someone is searching for any of those three keywords.
Now, up until this point, you’ve learned few little things that you can do to significantly help your SEO and your algorithm hacking efforts for social media.
That being said, if you have or plan to have a self-hosted website for your brand, and are interested in learning easy-to-apply but fantastically effective SEO strategies for giving your website that initial boost in search rankings, have a look into my course that will guide you through the process by clicking below.
Originally published at https://opinined.com on January 20, 2020.
