Illustration how seo in social media works

Understanding SEO in Social Media

Most businesses recognize that search engine optimization (SEO) and social media are integral to growth. Find out how you apply SEO in social media to platforms like Facebook or Twitter to bring your business’ content to more people online.

Most businesses recognize that search engine optimization (SEO) and social media are integral to growth. As reported in The Business Journals, SEO particularly benefits localized small businesses. Over the past two years, “near me” type searches grew by more than 900%, with 46% of all Google searches looking for local information. On the other hand, social media is a great way to develop your brand, attract customers, and build on your marketing strategy. It’s through SEO in social media, or social SEO, that optimization tactics are applied to platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube to bring your business’ content to more people online.

What is SEO in social media?

With the proliferation of the internet worldwide, search engines have changed how they bring content to the consumer. As a result, SEO was developed to ensure a business’ website appeared on the first page of search results, with different agencies approaching SEO in various ways. 

SEO in social media focuses on enhancing content distribution through social media channels and building brand awareness. A blog post called “Why Empathy is Important When Using Paid Social” notes that social media can be a great way to form a relatable and friendly brand, allowing you to connect with and respond to your target audience. This helps your business build trust and credibility, which remains crucial as your reputation grows. In turn, this strategy encourages traffic to be driven to your specific website, increasing your discoverability and opening up link-building opportunities. Through inbound links (backlinks) to your social media pages cited on other websites, your SEO rankings will improve.

How can you improve social SEO?

It’s essential to build a trustworthy social media platform that your consumers can relate to and rely on — requiring you to create valuable content that is both discoverable by new users and useful to existing followers. Here are two key tips on how you can improve social SEO:

Complete your social media ‘About’ section

Use Social Media as a Search Engine. One essential part of SEO is ensuring that your business contains keywords or phrases relevant to what potential customers are searching for. Some social media platforms have an ‘About’ or ‘Information’ section, which is the perfect place to describe your business. Through appropriate optimization, your content will be both more easily found through search engines and when searched using the respective social media platform. 

As shared by CNET on finding minority-owned companies, filling in key information can enable users to find the specific types of businesses they want to support. It’s also crucial to add your address, city, and state and link your other social media channels to ensure all localized information is complete for the best search engine rankings.

There are optimization measures for each individual social media platform, but these are beyond the scope of this blog post.

SEO in Social Media: Filling in key information

Create shareable content


Our post “Create the Best Content for Each Social Media Platform” highlights the importance of tailor-fitting your posts to the social media platform to increase the effectiveness of your marketing strategies. For example, Instagram is well-known for its beautiful product images and inspirational quotes, whereas Twitter needs posts to be concise and crispy. Do note that not everything has to be created by you — you can rely on user-generated content (UGC), such as pictures snapped by fans or positive customer reviews. You must always ask for permission and give credit whenever you incorporate UGC in your strategy.

Link and share content from your website or blog on social media. 

By linking your website content on social media, you get a lot of SEO benefits: 

  • By linking your posts on social media, your backlinks increase organically, which contributes to better SEO rankings
  • If your social media pages are mentioned on other websites, your SEO ranking also improves.
  • The more affine users come to your website from social media, the more its SEO ranking increases.
  • The probability that your pages will be indexed by the search engines increases

 

AutoPublish Instagram Reels

You can improve your website traffic and discovery by being thorough in your approach in SEO and Social. If you’re looking to invest more time in working on social SEO, our social media management tool Levuro can automate tedious social media tasks such as posting on multiple platforms to help you save time. You can expand your business’ reach and engagement by better understanding different platforms and streamlining processes.