7 Ways Your Social Media Strategy Might Hurt Your SEO

Did you know that social media can have a direct effect on your SEO? If done correctly, social media can drive organic traffic, generate high engagement rates, and improve SEO rankings. It can also increase your brand’s visibility and awareness. Read on to find out if your SEO is suffering from these most common social media mistakes!

Many marketers often neglect the importance of social media in boosting their website ranks in search engine results — it happens. Unfortunately, ineffective social media strategies can impact SEO. But there’s good news! It’s easy to put a stop to these bad habits!

The following points will confirm whether or not your fears are true, and if you need to make changes to your existing strategy:

1. Not Posting Enough Content on Social Media

With tons of platforms out there it can be easy to fall short on the content side. To stay competitive, you need to develop and distribute engaging content across the social platforms that you’re active on. Of course, that doesn’t mean post the same thing over and over and over. You need to make sure that your content is adapted to fit each profile. For example, if you’re using Instagram — go for visuals. If your’re posting to Twitter craft some short and sweet copy that will get people to click or Retweet.

Avoid posting one type of content on all of your social media profiles. Spice it up a bit with videos, GIFs, or blogs. Make your posts stand out even more by sprinkling in some emojis and hashtags as needed. But more than anything, ensure that the quality of the content is worthy of generating high engagement and views — this is key.

Obviously, high-quality content equals better SEO rankings. That’s because Google is well versed in sorting content based on what online audiences are searching for. It’s no longer about jam packing your content with keywords to out keyword your competition. It’s about getting inside the minds of your customers and creating quality content for each stage of the sales funnel.

Here’s a great example of how to repurpose content to fit different platform needs. Popular Instagrammer and blogger, Krystal Faircloth took to her website to share her experiences at Blue Sky Cabo through a blog review. It’s a perfect space for longer form content where she can go into the topic in depth.

But there’s no point in creating content if it’s not seen right? Faircloth, took to Instagram to raise awareness and drive traffic to her new piece. You’ll notice that the repurposed content plays to Instagram’s strengths incorporating a stunning photo, relevant hashtag, mention, and call to action with a link.

If you have a blog and aren’t using social media as a tool to drive traffic — you’re missing out big time.

With 400 million monthly active users, Google Plus has a lot of potential to impact your SEO. Even so, less than 30% of B2B companies use Google Plus for their content marketing strategies.

But apart from the numbers, why does Google Plus deserve your attention?

Well, it is the social network of the largest search engine, so you can imagine there’s some favoritism at play here. One of Google’s main goals is to improve the way Google recommends and identifies great content for its users. To get noticed you’ll need to have your company’s local listing on Google Plus. This will help improve your SEO, as it enables users to rate and review your business.

Tip: When creating individual posts on Google Plus be sure to use title tags. This is because Google uses the first sentence of your post to index your content — so it’s important to make sure you get this right. With this simple trick you’ll be able to give your content the boost it deserves.

3. Not Engaging Enough with Your Followers

According to Moz, engagement is the 5th most important factor that affects website rankings. Crazy right? Social media isn’t just about one-way broadcasts, it’s about sparking conversations among your community members. Simply by making your content more interactive you can positively affect your brand’s rankings, traffic, and visibility.

So how can you create engaging content? The answer is easy!

At the end of the day, engagement rates depends on the quality of your content. It needs to be something that resonates with your audiences. If you are ever wondering if your content has achieved relevance ask yourself — would be community share this piece?

Another way to spark engagement and put quality content out there is to collaborate with a influencers your audience’s trust to produce authentic content for your brand. Influencers are skillful and efficient at generating and increasing the engagement which helps your brand get quality visibility. Cooperating with the right influencer will undoubtedly result in high-quality traffic to your website, which will impact the rankings overall.

Take a look at the #GloriousBites campaign was launched by Gloria Ferrer in collaboration with influencers. The company wanted to promote their brand, so they created a branded hashtag that was used among their influencers.

The result of the campaign was amazing, as the brand generated 44 million impressions. It’s safe to say that finding the right influencers can help you get more engagement out of your social media content which can ultimately converted into website traffic. It’s dependent on what goals and measurement you set up when creating your influencer strategy.

4. Not Using Relevant Keywords

If you’re not using relevant keywords, you aren’t helping your search engine rankings improve. As a general rule, avoid using the common and general keywords related to your business. The competition for these words are fierce — chances are you won’t stand a chance ranking for these terms. Instead, focus on using long-tail keywords. Using long-tail keywords helps you better narrow in on a specific topic that your audiences are searching for. Building content that solves their problems helps you generate quality traffic to your site.

There’s a science to SEO. The trick is finding keywords have low competition, and are capable of generating quality traffic. But at the same time, they must be relevant to your business and buyer persona. To get an idea of who’s targeting what, type in long-tail keywords into a search engine and perform a quick competitor analysis. This will give you an idea of the types of keywords your competitors are using to generate qualified traffic.

You can also use tools like Pro Rank Tracker, SEMRUSH to monitor and assess the growth of relevant keywords. This will help you organize your SEO results while giving you more insight into keyword metrics so you can get closer to the top of page one.

5. Not Using Social Share Buttons on Your Website or Blog

Having social share buttons that show the number of likes, views, or shares your content garners can have a psychological effect on your audiences. At a glance big numbers help demonstrate that your content is valuable enough for other people to share. This could consequently encourage new visitors to share your content on their own channels because it looks credible.

With that point in mind, always make it as easy as possible for your audiences to share your content. If it takes more than a couple of clicks — it’s too complicated. Add various social buttons to your web pages and articles so that your visitors can share with ease. But of course, bare in mind that having share buttons is only half the battle. Putting buttons on poorly written content isn’t going to fool your readers into sharing. You need to ensure that you create content that is worth the read. You’ll see that as the number of interactions on a piece increases, your page ranking will rise. Coincidence? Not really.

For example, Jeff Bullas recently published a blog post on content marketing obstacles. In the image below, you can see a list of social buttons with share numbers neatly organized in the left hand side. The reader has no trouble identifying where the icons are which makes sharing a hassle-free experience.

Currently, in Google search results, Jeff’s post ranks second for the keyword “content marketing obstacles.” He must be doing something right!

6. Not Investing in Your Brand on Social

Believe it or not using social media as a branding tool can actually have a negative effect on your SEO. Social media is great branding tool because you are able to expand your reach and scale your content at incredible rates. Unlike traditional mediums you can directly tie your social media activities to ROI.

If you’ve invested in branding, audiences searching for industry-related content are more likely to click on your click as opposed to others — even if you’re lower on the page. That’s because they not only recognize you, but see you as a thought leader on the topic.

Build your brand on social media doesn’t have to be difficult. The first step should be to use a consistent logo across all of your social media channels. Easy right ? This is because you want audiences from LinkedIn to Facebook to recognize your brand in an instant.

You’ll also want to make sure that you include updated bios of your company on every platforms that you use. This is a great place to sneak in some keywords keywords related to your business. As a result, Google (as well as your future customers) will be able to understand your business better. And of course, always link back to your website when you can.

7. Focusing Too Much on Acquiring Followers

Unfortunately, companies still rely on vanity metrics to report on success. Often times brands see follower growth as one of the ultimate social media goals. The misconception is that having more followers will lead to more social media success overall. But that’s not the case at all! What good is a large following if it includes a bulk of member that don’t resemble your ideal customer?

Here’s the thing. Google treats Twitter and Facebook as normal websites — not as social platforms. That means the number of followers you have on social media will have no impact on your search rankings. So rather than developing strategies to increase your number of followers, focus on disseminating your content to the right audiences. You can also invest in social tools that can assist you in conducting effective outreach.

The Takeaway

SEO and social media strategies work better together. The role of social media is more than just promoting content. If used correctly, social media can help improve organic search. Though this is the case, brand’s often fall into the trap of developing isolated strategies for each.

It’s true that integrating SEO and social media can be challenging. To get it right you need to make sure that you’re staying clear of any of the mistakes we outlined above. If you take time to develop an integrated digital strategy you’ll be first on your customers’ minds as well as Google.

Want to up your search game even more? Learn how influencer marketing can help your SEO here.

Originally published at Socialbakers.com.

About The Author

Shane Barker is the Founder and CEO of Content Solutions and Gifographics. You can connect with him on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.