When a lot of business owners get started with digital marketing, they think that content, social and SEO marketing are completely distinct from one another. True, there are differences in how these three work by themselves. However, in the context of a marketing campaign, all three are intimately linked. If you want to be in the best position for managing your digital marketing, you need to understand this relationship thoroughly.
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These days, social media shares are quickly becoming one of the most prevalent forms of link building out there. There are many factors which affect your SERP rankings, and one of them is the amount of backlinks you have to your site. Unfortunately, the whole technique has been tainted by black-hat SEO tactics. These include keyword stuffing, putting invisible text into web pages, and fake websites containing backlinks. Google has realised this, and as a result have moved onto more reliable sources of backlinks. Facebook likes, retweets, +1s and all the others are now the most relevant backlinks for any company website. This has cut out a lot of the work that was required for finding homes for links, and brought SEO and social media closer together.
Social media and site authority are also intimately linked in the world of modern digital marketing. With any of your blog posts or web pages, Google will give you a higher rank if it holds them as credible sources. This is calculated based on the amount of backlinks you have, as well as your social media influence in general. This is determined on what some marketers call the three R’s: relevance, reach and resonance. To get your web presence healthy in these areas, ask yourself three questions. Is your blog content relevant to your company brand? How large is the pool of people you can reach with the content you’re posting? Are the users engaging with your content valuable, or forgettable? When you take care of these areas on your social platforms, your site authority will take care of itself.
Finally, the influence of social media has made SEO far less technical than it used to be. Understanding all of Google’s algorithm changes is near impossible, mainly because of how numerous they are. However, with more recent changes, content has become more and more relevant, and has made SEO a lot more friendly to humans. At one time, you could stuff a piece of content with a certain keyword, and then sit back and watch it float to the top of SERPs. Nowadays, Google’s far more interested in the kind of content you’re publishing, rather than technical little details. Sure, the way you engineer your URL, H1, Meta Description, and title tags are still taken into account. However, the keywords you use here have to answer questions which users are asking, rather than simply sitting there. Set keyword quotas by all means, just make sure the content really matters to people.
I hope this post has opened your eyes to the intimate relationship between SEO and social media marketing!