I started writing about social media marketing and then I started receiving questions from other influencers on why I redirect my blog to my social media pages rather than get more subscribers to grow the blog as it’s easier to pull in business with many followers/subscribers. Well, it depends on what sales target one has a month on month. In most of my conversations with the older generation last week though, there were discussions around SEOs and how we need as social marketers to understand how best to turn them to our advantage. so today, let me start by answering these questions, can social media help with SEO? What’s the impact? What are the chances I will sell more!

For those new to these terms, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is ideally the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. Hope this makes sense now, but then for those intending to learn more, there are a number of researches you might follow through to understand SEO better so allow me to share something small before I answer the questions. Let’s deep dive into the SEO world with these few words. SERP: Search engine results page, this is a page that helps you see the results of particular keywords you would want to use. Then from the search, you will find the search rank: The position a URL holds on a SERP for a particular keyword. SERP uses search visibility when tracking the aggregate ranking of a website for a basket of keywords. For content creators with domains will also need to know the Domain or page authority which is the strength of a website or page on a particular subject in the eyes of search engines.

In simple times the numerous times a word appears on a google search it’s registered as a keyword and google can rank this based on how users search refer. The use of highly ranked keywords on your content gives you a probability that users searching for these words are likely to view your content as one of the results pulled in from their search. This could drive traffic to your site or page. The benefits are even greater if you are selling.  There has been a notion that social media has no impact on SEOs and social marketers have for some time struggled to provide content in social media platforms with no use of keywords, we have long been of the idea that visual medium sales more but then there is the aspect of traffic that complements the visual. Driving traffic should be the main focus for content creators so that marketing can make a lot more sense!

Having reviewed so many social media campaigns, allow me to provide my though on this, I must say, these are my personal views based on my observations over a period. Since 2014, Google has publicly denied that social has any direct effect on rankings but in my view I see a lot has changed in 2021, and even as the pandemic started the shift to social media platforms has really changed the way we get information. Social media has started appearing in search engines on a much larger scale. So this weekend I take a look at SERP and do not fail to notice the exponential growth of Facebook and Twitter pages making their way into Google’s results. You know seeing these two pages’ URLs ranking within the top 100 means the shift is on.

Which Way Fellow Marketers

Social Media can help with SEO. Tough we should be very careful not to have a lot of posts on people’s feeds, content sales, and keeps followers to your social media pages but the moment you over post marketing content, followers might feel chocked and might decide the unfollow you. The reason some of us do not watch Citizen TV is that they run so many adverts within a program, so if you see this as true, what of social media, your followers might think the same and move on to other pages.

Quality of posts, let’s move away from quantity, or clout chasing: if you are not providing value in your content, then there is no point. SEO ranking will go down and that means your value obviously drops. In the quest to be frequent with content provision, ensure there is quality at all times.

As social entrepreneurs, we should also start thinking of the implications of paid promotion on SEO and other site mentions on our social media pages. This could really boost your ranking by associating with the most sort after brands. Remember to understand how authoritative the site is that links to your own site. In my view, SEO should be thoughtfully integrated into your broader social marketing strategy as the driving force.

©JMS 2021