How to make sure your SEO and social media efforts complement each other

If you know who Google’s Matt Cutts is, you most likely know the importance of search engine optimisation and following the correct SEO guidelines laid out by the search engine giant. And by only listening to him, you probably think that SEO is all about writing a couple of good articles and that getting others to link to it will do the trick.

But if you are only going to play the Google Webmasters Guidelines game, you will find that you won’t get anywhere fast — probably resulting in you taking short cuts to meet your SEO goals, or giving up completely. This is where social media comes in, as it can help you get quality links that will benefit your SEO campaign.

Link building

Natural links you receive from third parties who feel that your content is valuable, relevant, and useful are worth gold in the SEO game. Gaining these natural links isn’t easy when you are starting with your campaign as it can take quite a lot of effort and time to get your content seen by those who might be willing to link to you.

If you have a new website that doesn’t have a direct audience, make use of social media to get the ball rolling. One of the easiest methods is using social media to promote your content to your target audience.

To give you an example: If you have a site that isn’t yet established and doesn’t have lots of traffic, publishing a new blog post with the hope of Google picking it up won’t be a quick solution, as it might take a long time to be indexed and generate natural links. On the other hand, if you have spent time building up your Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and Facebook following, you can share the content directly with your audience.

If you are engaging with the right audience on the social web, there is a big chance that people are going to link to and share your content with their own social circles, increasing your reach and digital footprint online. The better quality content you produce, the more likely other people will be interested and will share and pass it along.

How can you get started with this?

• Invest in creating magnetic content. This will help your content travel and will keep your visitors on your site for longer.
• Focus on building a strong social media community.
• Make your content easily shareable.
• Don’t be afraid to reach out via social media so that other likeminded individuals can share your content. Make your content interesting, useful and relevant.

SEO and social media shouldn’t be measured in their own silos. Combined and working hand in hand, they will make measuring your digital marketing campaigns easier. Using a simple method of setting up goals in Google Analytics and then creating specific campaigns through the use of UTM links, you can track, measure, and work out the ROI of your SEO and social media campaign.