LinkedIn and SEO. Do they work together? Better than you’d expect!

Most of the time, people do SEO with Google in mind. Their goal is to make their website appear in Google’s top positions where the majority of users can find it. And while site owners often want their brands to be popular in social media as well, such a task requires its own approach – often unique to each social network. SMO and SEO are related, but they are two different beasts.

However, if you are an avid Google user, you might have come across an organic search result from the domain LinkedIn.com at least once. That’s right: Google indexes LinkedIn pages! And when Google indexes and ranks a page, then the rules of SEO apply.

Who needs LinkedIn SEO and why?

Unlike most other social media platforms, LinkedIn isn’t meant for entertainment. It’s a place for professionals to advertise their expertise and their brands. Whether you are a freelancer, an employee or a CEO, you can benefit both from using LinkedIn and optimizing your profile page.

What are the benefits?

• Reputation growth
• Forging connections
• New career opportunities
• Cultivation of your authority as an expert
• Interacting with your customers (and gaining new ones)

If you are serious about your future, then you can’t ignore LinkedIn.

And what about SEO for LinkedIn? It consists of three major elements:

1. Your profile page information;
2. Page activity (the content you post);
3. Connecting with other professionals.

Time to go into detail about the whole process.

1. Find the right keywords

Keywords and keyword optimization haunt every website with a search feature. LinkedIn is no exception. It’s just a matter of knowing how to find good keywords and how to use them.

If you have a website and use LinkedIn to promote it, then you should already have a list of good keywords – the same ones you use on your site.

But better to be safe than sorry. Cover your bases by taking these steps:

• Research the topics that your target audience is interested in – then collect the most promising key terms and phrases from there.
• Prepare a list of terms relevant to your specialty. For example, if you are a C# programmer, then you will want to use words like senior developer, Visual Studio etc. in your profile and content.

How to find keywords for LinkedIn?

There are two great places to look. The first of them is LinkedIn itself.

• LinkedIn profiles. Users with complete profiles will often have a full list of their skills and qualifications. Not only it shows what they can do, it also helps them to be found by the right people. Be sure to adopt the same tactic!
• Search bar. Suppose you are looking for a .NET developer. If you type that in LinkedIn’s search bar, you will receive a bunch of similar search queries before you even press Enter. And after you do, the search results will also have more expanded descriptions like Entry level .NET developer or Senior full stack .NET developer.

The other place to look is an SEO tool for finding keywords, such as WebCEO’s Keyword Suggestions. Type in your keyword ideas and pick the results with the highest search volume – i.e. the ones most searched by users.

2. Use images in your profile

First impressions matter always, on LinkedIn as well.

Once people find your LinkedIn profile, it will take them only a few moments to decide whether you are worth their time. Make those moments count by uploading an avatar (or profile picture) and a banner (or hero image).

What kind of avatar do you need?

• For a personal page, it must be your headshot. Upload your best, most presentable-looking photo. Suiting up and smiling are optional; facing the camera is mandatory.
• For a company page, upload the logo.

The ideal dimensions are 400×400 pixels.

What kind of banner do you need?

The background banner is much larger than the profile picture. The recommended size is 1584×396 – wide enough to cover a good portion of any screen. Just imagine how much information you can put in all those pixels!

You may correctly assume that banners need text; just don’t overdo it. A tagline is good. A call-to-action is great. Stating the value you offer is the best. Be brief and get to the point, and your visitors will be impressed.

(Image source: Cultivated Culture)

Design a good banner with these things in mind, but be careful with its bottom left corner! Don’t put anything important there – that part will be covered by your avatar.

3. Fill out your information

After the imagery comes the text. Time to fill out your profile and put your keywords to good use.

There’s a lot of work to do and many ways to enhance your page’s SEO.

Start editing your profile page and fill out as many sections as you can! Complete profiles look better than incomplete ones on any day – leave no stone unturned.

The sections are divided between three groups:

• Core: the basic information about you. Full name, current position, services, education, skills and so on. This is the bare minimum you need to fill out – but do feel free to keep going.
• Recommended: if you have any certifications, licenses, courses or recommendations, this is the place to display them.
• Additional: if you are a real expert, you can show off your awards, patents or publications here. This group also includes sections for your contact information and the languages you speak, so make sure to add them.

As a rule of thumb, the greater a section’s character limit, the better it is for using keywords. For example, sections like Headline and About are where you describe what you do, making them perfect for adding a keyword or two.

What about the company pages on LinkedIn? In terms of filling out your profile, they work almost the same. They have just two more very important sections:

• Products: describe what you are selling, pricing plans, highlights, videos and screenshots.
• Jobs: your open positions.

LinkedIn appreciates every bit of relevant information you add. The more you can tell about yourself and your company, the more chances you have to catch the attention of the right people.

4. Publish high-quality, SEO-friendly content

Now that your profile page looks great and optimized, it’s time for the next step: page activity.

Just like every other platform, LinkedIn values original, high-quality content. Even better if it’s optimized to be picked up by search algorithms.

Since Google indexes LinkedIn pages, you can safely follow the same SEO methods you want to use for any other website:

1. Make posts and publish articles. As always, they need to match the user search intent and offer value to users.
2. Use eye-catching headlines. Make the viewers interested as soon as they see your post in their feed.
3. Post often. At least a couple times a week will do, but if you can do it even more often – power to you.
4. Create many different types of posts. Don’t restrict yourself to text posts. Diversify your LinkedIn content by posting images, videos and polls as well.
5. Include keywords. Use them throughout your texts in a natural way, avoid stuffing and cannibalization (optimizing multiple pages for the same keywords). Titles, headings and image captions love keywords.
6. Add call-to-actions. If you want visitors to not just read, but also do something beneficial to you after reading (like buy your product), this step is a must.
7. Respond quickly! Engagement is a powerful ranking signal on LinkedIn. When users comment under your posts, be quick to reply and give them a reaction. That way, you will appear in their notifications and prompt them to interact with your page some more.

5. Create connections

Now you have an optimized LinkedIn profile page and high-quality content. All that’s left is to somehow bring visitors to your profile. But how?

No matter how well you optimize your content for search, it will never be enough on its own. This is where LinkedIn’s main weapon comes in: connecting with other people.

What can – and should – you do on LinkedIn?

1. Follow other people and groups. When you follow someone, use the opportunity to introduce yourself and state your expectations. Just remember that on LinkedIn, being civil and professional is an absolute must. (Don’t take Inigo Montoya’s example too literally.)

2. Comment under and react to other people’s content. The best comments are the ones where you add your 5 cents about something the original poster may have missed, or ask questions about that.
3. Make your own posts in groups. Take the initiative and start discussions yourself – that will earn you a lot more attention.
4. Answer questions. If someone pings you by mentioning your name, it’s your chance to demonstrate your expertise. The better your answer, the more likely you are to impress the right people.

Most of the time, your feed will be filled with content from the pages you follow, and the opposite is also true. More followers = more visibility.

Be active on LinkedIn, expand your bubble and e-meet as many professionals as you can. Doing so will open the path to the next major step in LinkedIn SEO…

6. Collect endorsements and recommendations

After you connect with someone and add them to your network, you unlock the option to endorse their skills and give them recommendations. Naturally, it works both ways: people in your network can do the same for you.

(Image source: Cultivated Culture)

It doesn’t get more straightforward than that. Other professionals in the field directly vouching for you – could you ask for a better boost to your reputation?

It’s obvious why LinkedIn sees this as a ranking signal. If there are people who can confirm that you are a pro, then you definitely deserve getting picked up by the search algorithm.

Just like with customer reviews, the best way to get endorsements and recommendations is to ask the people you’ve worked with.

7. Track and analyze relevant metrics

How do you know your LinkedIn SEO strategy is working?

If your profile is buzzing with notifications, if you are getting job offers or CVs day and night, then you’ve definitely succeeded. But that probably won’t happen as soon as you make your first comment somewhere.

It will be a slow, gradual process that you can monitor with special tools – and adjust your strategy based on your progress (or lack thereof).

LinkedIn Analytics display how users interact with your profile and how popular it is overall. Those metrics include:

• Number of your followers;
• How many people viewed your profile;
• How many times you appeared in other people’s search.

Analytics for company pages will have even more data:

• User engagement (likes, shares, comments);
• Clicks, impressions and CTR for your posts;
• Follower demographics (location, industry, seniority);
• Competitor metrics (followers, engagement).

What if you are managing multiple LinkedIn business pages? In this case, you should connect them all to WebCEO’s LinkedIn Insights tool – and you’ll be able to switch between their data in a single click.

With all relevant data at your fingertips, you can plan the next step to make your LinkedIn SEO strategy succeed.

Boost your LinkedIn page with SEO Sign Up Free

The post LinkedIn SEO: How to Optimize Your Profile Like a Professional appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Influencer Marketing is greater than ever, although at the end of the 1990s we couldn’t even imagine it. Thanks to the Internet letting people open up their own communication channels with the world, everything changed. The Internet became a rich field for conducting advertising campaigns, and day by day it helps marketing experts make their points and reach new, current and old customers. Using Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, X (Twitter), Pinterest and LinkedIn, brands have gotten extra opportunities to promote their products. How did this happen?

Social media platforms took the world by storm. Facebook and Twitter, at the moment of their launching, were a breath of fresh air. Within seconds, they became a place of interest for thousands of people. Year by year these platforms, including YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat, get updated, expand and provide great new possibilities for advertising. Nowadays, mobile devices have overtaken desktop devices and laptops as a platform for marketing. Mobile Internet usage presents a lot of benefits for advertisers. They are able to:

• reach specific audiences, extending their client base in local areas;
• make their brands recognizable;
• heighten the brand’s conversion rate and its loyalty;
• learn insights from their target base.

How can they do these with the help of Influencer Marketing?

Influencer Marketing in general is a process of selling products and promoting brands with the help of people who have a definitive level of authority on social media. A lot of readers think that Influencer Marketing is all about celebrities who started their accounts there. However, a lot of modern influencer marketing is done via ordinary people who gained their popularity on their social media platform from the very bottom, using only the Internet, their skills, knowledge, and desire. These are Instagram and YouTube bloggers, popular users of Facebook and Twitter, and so on.

Let’s be honest and admit: people whom we follow on social media have much more influence than film stars or popular singers. The reason is simple: we trust people whom we have spent years in “close relation” with, watching their success and monitoring their life through photos, videos, or comments.

What are the reasons for using Influencer Marketing when there are already a bunch of ads on the Internet?

Browser Ads are presented via pop-ups, paid results on SERPs, and irritating ads on websites, which are usually cheap and off-putting. Those are always in front of our eyes and, you may suppose, are more powerful, but this is not so. Users are tired of advertisements nowadays and use powerful Ad Blockers, erasing all that is inappropriate for them. On social media developers try to present advertisements in a non-disturbing way, so people even stop scrolling for a few seconds to analyze products provided. Many people like sponsored posts thinking they’re from a friend.

One more reason to advertise on social media is the fall in popularity of TV. TV was once the main way advertisers conducted new campaigns, but time flies and televisions are now being removed from households every day. The race is on to see who will see the last television ad.

With access to the Internet, people just stopped watching ordinary TV channels and started buying subscriptions for services like Netflix, where they can watch popular shows without ads and long waiting periods. Moreover, Generation Z is a significant and important cohort of potential consumers, and they almost don’t watch TV these days, going for social media and messaging apps.

EVEN THOUGH social media has become an important part of our lives and it gives marketing experts a lot of ways to promote products, it’s still not an easy task. People still don’t like advertisements and have a rich choice of what to buy and what to pass by. Advertisers should think a lot about ad campaigns in order to raise demand among capricious customers.

There are some disadvantages you may not have taken into account. Influencer Marketing is an expensive “service” which, unfortunately, can’t grant a large amount of success in most cases. Everything depends on the Influencer’s work and your effort as well.  It’s hard to avoid mistakes. Everything is possible, starting from a wrong presentation of a product because of a poorly prepared strategy and including posting the wrong text by accident. Influencer Marketing is really popular these days and your competitors may have already formed relationships with them.

How to Bear Fruit with Influencer Marketing Step by Step

STEP #1: Research

The future always asks the past for some advice. Your company and its marketing history are one of the most powerful instruments in your hands. Take some projects which are even a bit similar to the one you are currently building a campaign for and explore them comprehensively: sales level, income, customers, models, and – the most important – mistakes. Take a look at your competitors’ performances with similar products and learn their behavior on social media. Pay attention to posts and comments. This will help you to build a strategy and identify your target audience.

You should collect accurate data concerning the potential target audience of the product you want to promote with the help of social media. You can learn a lot of useful material concerning people’s activity on social media, including their demands and behavior regarding branded products. It may be necessary to identify the age, nationality, occupation and interests of people whom your goods may appeal to. This helps to build a decent advertisement campaign and attract a lot of people. Take into account the location of your target audience!

If you are going to promote your products beyond one country’s borders, you should learn the foreign customers’ perceptions of the goods you provide in order not to make any mistakes and hurt your reputation.

After defining your target audience, you should learn where those people “live”: on Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube. Why is this important? By advertising on the platform where your potential clients chill out most of their time, you will increase the chances for your product to be shown to a greater slice of your target audience.

This is when your Influencers come to the game. Seeing products via people we like and trust, we accordingly start trusting what they trust. This is because Influencers appreciate their audience and reputation a lot and will not advise something bad or untested.

• For demographic and physiographic data gathering you can use Google Analytics.

STEP #2: Budget Approval

Budget problems are always the most troublesome. You should take into account everything and a bit more. Plan your budget with the thought of unexpected circumstances. Get a budget approval with best procurement tools. Popular influencers, especially Instagram and YouTube Influencers, are expensive, because they have a large audience and a lot of them know how much their words cost. Depending on the future strategy for your project, keep in mind that you may want to involve multiple influencers.

Compensation (indemnification) is an important point in your budget plan. There are two points you should pay attention to. The first is you will have to pay an Influencer if your product causes any harm to his or her reputation. The second is a compensation to you if the Influencer doesn’t fulfill his or her obligations fully or does any harm to a product’s or company’s reputation. This is important for both sides and serves as an extra motivation for a successful promotion.

STEP #3: Goal Identification and Strategy Development

In order to build a successful strategy, you should identify your goals – results which you want to get at the end.

If you are at the starting point of your journey, your marketing strategy may be directed to promoting your brand name and establishing a minimum sales level – to see if people are interested in the product you provide.

You may be seeking an extension of your current customer base. You may be advertising a standard product to a new age or lifestyle group. In this case you should take into account Influencers who are interesting for this new group of potential clients. However, remember consumers who are already satisfied with your company. They are the easiest to get more sales from and the costliest of losses if they move to your competition.

The other type of goal is an extension of geographical horizons – entering the international market. You should be the most careful here, because new countries mean new cultures, ideas, and outlooks; even religion must be taken into account. You have to build your strategy so every person will be satisfied or at least not offended.

Sometimes one of the goals may be a cooperation with “new faces”. This means a long term partnership between your company and (an) Influencer(s) you want to work with.

Proper goal identification will help to build a successful marketing campaign, beneficial for each party.

Here we’ve come to the marketing strategy development.

Strategy is basically as important as the process of creating the product.

Work on your concept. At this stage you should think about the uniqueness of your product: why it is better than others and how you can disclose this. Set your product apart from others, impress your potential Influencer with the product, so that he or she and even you yourself would like to try it too.

It is always better to set up several strategies instead of focusing on one. While developing different directions of your marketing campaign you should “touch” and work with at least ten or fifteen successful ideas. However, they may cover different sides of the product and not represent its benefits entirely. So, work on each of them, make them viable, and then put them together. In the end your strategy will be a mix of everything that came to your mind and you saw value in.

Your strategy should cover everything. Decide on platform(s) where your campaign will be promoted. Don’t take into consideration only one platform. People who are interested in your product can breathe everywhere and follow your Influencer everywhere, and the more often they see your advertisement, the greater the desire will rise in them to try it.

There are a lot of examples of advertisers cooperating with social media Influencers, asking them to make a post/say some words in a video about the product, and… nothing more. This is a strike out. Those posts are replaced by others, especially if an Influencer updates really often, and they eventually get lost. This is an under-developed marketing strategy. Yes, this gives some results at the beginning, but you can’t expect this to be tremendous. People should encounter your content as often as possible.

However, you should remember one thing. The social media audience, and people in general, don’t like direct advertisements, they prefer to see why your product is better than others of the same category and is worth their time.

Marketing experts not always know how to use influencers, although there are a lot of ways.

Try to do a series of posts/videos/experiments. This can be a step by step acquaintance with a new product, which an Influencer will try on him-/herself. This will raise trust among the audience; to see a quality sample of your goods and your company itself. Organize not only your Internet promotion, but take him or her to a public venue, where he or she can physically meet with followers and present your product face to face.

Apart from this, people like presents, so give them your product for free, conducting giveaways. What are the benefits of this? In most cases an Influencer gets more followers and your product is discussed not only on an Influencer’s page, but also in the private messages of those who won something.

Take as many stars as you are able to. Start working with several people who are popular enough and make your marketing campaign a competitive collaboration. Influencers will do their best to attract more people to your product than other bloggers you made an offer to. Followers are also happy to see they are working mutually with people they like. Moreover, you can extend the size of the audience who will see your advertisement. This point refers not to every situation, but more people = more diversity. The audience of each Influencer, even if they are from the same niche, is different, because Influencers themselves are not alike: their personality, lifestyle, and outlook attract a great variety of people who may not be found everywhere.

[Popular YouTube book bloggers interviewing an author during the promoting campaign of a new book]

Seed an idea. We can’t apply this only to Influencer Marketing, but to each sphere where strategy development is needed. Sharing your ideas with other people will help you to analyze them deeper. A new, fresh look will help you to identify the weak and strong sides of your ideas, and this can push you to try other variants.

STEP #4: Search for Influencers

An important part of Influencer Marketing strategy is to find those people who will best present your product to a wide audience. There are several ways to identify people who fit your niche and specific project best:

• Use special services which present to you things like demographic data and an Influencers’ sphere of work. Learn about services that you may want to use in the future. All of them cover Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and YouTube;
• Use #hashtags:

1. Monitor publications covering specific topics on social media, using existing hashtags. You can separate them and look at the most popular ones. Hashtags are keywords on social media, so don’t hesitate to use this method, if services are not for you.

2. Use WebCEO’s Keyword Research Tool which can help you create new successful keywords in your niche that will bring you more people who are interested in your product.

• Conduct Google research. A lot of the websites which are dedicated to your niche may write articles about young and popular faces in their sphere, providing a detailed history of their success. This is a good opportunity to know more about people who are gaining authority day by day.

Learn some tips for choosing the right people:

• Don’t instantly go to an Influencer with millions of followers.

There are a few reasons for this step. First, such Influencers are too expensive, because of the big audience they have. Second, a wide audience doesn’t mean great engagement. Star Influencers may have a lot of followers, but in fact may have a zero-level connection with them. Here comes trouble, because people will pay no attention to your goods.

And, on the other hand, micro-Influencers who have significantly less followers, but a higher level of engagement on their page, have more of a chance to reach people’s attention and promote your products. So, learn everything carefully before choosing people for your campaign, don’t prey on stars or statistics.

Sometimes, in a matter of weeks, an Influencer can get a huge amount of followers for whatever reason: scandal, success, or paid self-advertisement. Don’t try to cooperate with them, because an unexpected wave of followers doesn’t mean the audience will trust the Influencer regarding your product.

• Learn about an Influencers’ brand collaboration and sponsoring history.

This is necessary to know whom an Influencer has worked with. Knowing this information will give you a lot of opportunities:

1. You can find out if this person worked with competitors,
2. How successful this was,
3. People’s opinion about the product an Influencer promoted,
4. How many people were attracted, and
5. Knowing how much they took for a single post/video-mention can help you with the current price calculations.

• Learn the way Influencers operate their accounts.

This means their attitude to followers and the way they represent their niche. You have to learn the style in which an Influencer works: whether they upload long-read posts focused on important problems/funny things, or do they do entertaining or scientific videos. With this you can already be prepared and aware of the format your product will be presented in. As a result, you can draft a script or work on a concept.

• Learn why people have come to that Influencer.

This is about the reputation of an Influencer and what attracts people to him or her. If he or she has a reputation for being a drunk partygoer, it will probably not help you to sell medicine for the liver, for instance.

How to Reach Influencers?

Common methods are:

• Direct Messaging on the main account on social media or the one on which some Influencers create specifically for promotion collaboration offers;
• Through email which is also created specifically for advertisers and which is mentioned on the main page of their site and/or profiles;
• Via the email or phone number of the Influencer’s agent;
• Via the comments section if none of the above mentioned methods are available.

HOWEVER, don’t spam nor subscribe these contacts to an automated email campaign, because this risks abusing GDPR rules!

STEP #5: Strategy Approving and Scheduling

You can’t approve a strategy without presenting it to the person who will work for you. Do not rely fully on the plan which you prepared and which may seem the best for you only.

Let Influencers teach you. This is important because Influencers know their audience the best. No-one will ever be better consultants than they are. After presenting your strategy to the Influencers, who have agreed to cooperate with you, listen to the Influencer’s suggested strategy. People who dedicate their lives to social media and work there know much more about how things work there and can share some valuable tips and tricks. Your strategy will not be complete until Influencers give their final approval.

Vary your concept for each Influencer. If you have decided to bring several Influencers to your project, then give them freedom of expression along with the right to participate in your marketing campaign, especially the Influencers needed for international marketing campaigns. They will make your advertisement brighter, catchy, and successful, using their rich experience. Moreover, they are cultural background experts who will help you to avoid any mistakes.

Schedule the whole working process. Proper scheduling can bring you more success than you think. Sponsored posts are not published by accident. They happen after serious analytical data gathering including know: people’s moods during different parts of the day, the hours of their presence on social media, and even the most visited day of the week. Don’t be afraid to notify your Influencers about posts they should publish. Each detail needs control.

STEP #6: Payment

There are several types of payment for Influencers:

• Monetary compensation:

1. Set price. More often this type of payment is taken by Influencers who have a lot of followers and work with advertisements really well, fulfilling your goal. They set their price or this is set as a result of negotiation with this person or his/her agent. You can pay an Influencer for the quantity of likes and shares, or for people who came to your site above a control amount after ad material was uploaded.

2. Commission + Discount. One more way is to appoint your Influencer(s) a commission from sales on a monthly or weekly basis. You can also supply him or her with a discount for this product which may be used by the Influencers’ followers. This is a nice variant for a long term cooperation and may be comfortable both for you and the Influencer.

• Free products. Beginners usually don’t take money. If you cooperate with young Influencers, who are just building his or her reputation, they may ask for your products for free in order to use them by themselves or present to followers.

STEP #7: Results Tracking

We’ve come to the final step which will show you whether you had success with your campaign.

Results Tracking concerns two parties: you take the statistics from your Influencer(s) and then comply it with your company’s reports. Information from your Influencer concerns engagement. You can’t receive all the information just looking at likes, shares, or comments. Some pieces of this are open to the social media account’s master only. So, don’t forget to ask for those reports.

Analyze your ROI (Return on Investment). Simply put: you will learn the level of your success in percentage (or ratio). This shows you how successful your marketing campaign was and how much (an) Influence(s) brought to your house.

Check your website’s performance on social media. You will definitely publish some material regarding the product on your company’s social media timelines and site landing pages. With WebCEO’s Social Engagement Tool you can easily observe your rankings, social citations and the traffic brought to your website via Facebook and Pinterest.

Also WebCEO’s Facebook Insights Tool gives a detailed report regarding Facebook engagement, niche popular posts, page’s likes, reactions, shares, comments, and clicks on posts. This can also help you to learn demographic data.

WebCEO’s Web Buzz Monitoring Tool helps you to track mentions of your product in news, blogs, and tweets.

SEO Benefits of Influencer Marketing

Any activity on your social media accounts can bring SEO benefits to your website. With Google Web Search Analytics, you can easily analyze how exactly you succeeded after your marketing campaign launched. A powerful advertisement on social media can mean a lot of traffic and the improvement of your positions on SERPs. Google and other search engines like when people come to websites and stay there for a lot of time. This means that the quality of your content will be rewarded by search engines with good rankings.

Moreover, Influencer Marketing can drive a high number of backlinks to your website. Although Google doesn’t count backlinks from social media, it does count backlinks from websites which took your link from an Influencers’ social media timeline. A large amount of backlinks means higher domain authority.

However, be careful about so-called toxic links, because they can have a negative impact on your rankings. Use WebCEO’s Backlink Quality Check Tool to clean your backlink profile. This can help you to identify the total amount of backlinks, linking domains and their authority, link texts, and which of the backlinks are toxic enough to put in Google’s Disavow List.

IN CONCLUSION, Influencer Marketing would likely be a win-win strategy for you: each party will get a piece of the pie at the end of the journey. The best way to find your winning Influencers is to learn about your competitors and their social media campaigns which brought them success and rich backlinks.

Use WebCEO’s Competitor Backlink Spy to find blogs and hubs that promote your competitors and use such channels of opportunity for your website!

The post A Step by Step Guide to Influencer Marketing appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Part III: Track Your Success

We’ve come to the last but not least part of our social media optimization journey. Today you will learn how to analyze the results of your social media optimization campaign and what instruments you might need for this task.

TRACK YOUR SUCCESS

Step #1: How to Track the Results of Your Social Media Campaign

[ Quantify your success with Social Analytics Tools ]

Social media marketing ranges from “somewhat effective” to “very effective” for businesses.

Your results will come in figures. Real success comes in high figures.

A lot of statistics for business accounts are provided by social media platforms in the form of APIs. Through WebCEO or stand-alone social media analytics tools, you can access these data pipes. You will need to analyze percentages, graphs, and diagrams. The advantage of using tools is they offer a coherent investigation and control over your performance on multiple social media platforms starting from the research steps and going straight to the gathering of results.  

Let’s learn some of them:

1. Buffer

Buffer is a platform where, apart from analyzing the results of your content promotion, you can publish on major social media platforms. You will get access to the following helpful features:

• post writing and planning: write posts and add them to a calendar to control the timing and campaigns dedicated to special events on specific platforms;
• posts an “achievements” analysis: get stats on the quantity of new followers, engagement rate, unique reach on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, etc.;
• collaborate with your team: if you work on a team, you will get the necessary elements for building a convenient working environment for team members; sharing the responsibilities will become significantly easier and more effective;
• communicate with your customers: start a conversation with interested customers, reply to their messages, sort them by tags and folders, give your team members the right to take part in specific conversations.

2. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo will lead you through the whole process of promoting on social media. Research, planning, content creation, results analysis; cooperation with influencers will no longer be a tough mission.

• pick up what is trending now and follow the newest ideas: analyze the freshest content on the Internet by different locations and time of release. Build a clear picture of who you can attract and surprise new users with;
• analyze the essentials: get a list of formats your audience might be most satisfied with and find out why your competitors outrun you;
• find your influencers on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, analyze their performance by different metrics; you will have an opportunity to examine the influencers who work with your competitors and identify their strong and weak sides.

3. Social Sprout

Sprout Social will help you organize your working process and make it easier, helping you and your team act in rhythm. 

Sprout Social provides everything a user needs for research, analysis, planning and publishing. You will be able to manage your publications: create drafts, schedule them and add to a corporate calendar, administer several platforms simultaneously and assign specific team members to particular tasks.

Sprout Social creates all the conditions for efficient work with messages. Your team members will be able to hold conversations with customers as soon as a team leader gives permission. You will receive reports on your social media performance.

4. TapInfluence

If you are going to work with influencers, this platform is totally for you. It will help investigate influencers who are popular in your niche by keywords and their performance. Get a full profile on a person you would like to cooperate with: age, gender, location, education, etc. Influencer’s history on social media, his or her insights and revenue you could get after the cooperation – these will be outlined for a user to help choose the best representative for a product. You will find a top-notch influencer for your business.

5. Google Trends

A free SEO tool provided by Google will be helpful if you don’t know what keyword to choose between several variants: it will demonstrate how popular these have been through time. This tool will also show you recently trending keywords, stories and insights.

If there are other tools for social media performance analysis, then why do I need the WebCEO Social Analytics Tools? – you might ask.

First, WebCEO puts everything in one place. This is significantly more comfortable than switching between different types of statistics on different websites and applications.

Second, WebCEO not only shows you statistics, we analyze the statistics for you and determine your weak and strong points.

Third, WebCEO helps you spy on your competitors.

All you need is to create content. WebCEO will care about everything else, for example:

WebCEO’s Web Buzz Monitoring Tool will show your mentions on different blogs, news sections and tweets. You will see the headlines of articles, the time of their publication and a link to a source and its name. Regarding Twitter, you will be provided with the list of tweets you are mentioned in, plus the number of their retweets and likes.

WebCEO’s Social Engagement Tool will tell you everything about your Facebook and Pinterest performance:

• The level of engagement on Facebook with detailed data concerning likes, shares, and comments;
• The total number of Pinterest shares;
• Your competitors’ citations in comparison with yours;
• Your social traffic in terms of the number of sessions, average bounce and conversion rate, the number of completions and their monetary value.

WebCEO’s Facebook Insights Tool takes the data from your Facebook account to present it in the most comfortable way. Using this you will be aware of:

• Your competitors’ Facebook engagement level: reactions, shares, and comments on their Facebook pages by day;
• Your page metrics by chosen periods of time in comparison with previous results: likes, feedback, organic page reach, level of post engagement, and the number of clicks on them;
• Page demographic.

To learn all this data without traveling between websites and tabs, start scanning on WebCEO and we will present you with everything at once.

No need to thank us; we are happy to do this for you!

Make Your Social Media Work for Conversions with WebCEO Sign Up Free

Step #2: What Are the SEO Benefits of Social Media Marketing?

[ Learn what you get when your website performs well on social media ]

Social media has become an essential part of SEO, even if search engines were not measuring likes and shares on various platforms (Google does this). You will help your website grow significantly because your traffic should increase to become 25% of your total traffic if you use social media.  

You will build your reputation. Social media can make you popular as soon as you go there with viral content. Give this a lot of quality, thorough research, and build your material using expert thought processes and real evidence. Write as well as you can and present your work to a relevant audience. A great job will be rewarded and lead to great results.

Why is this worthy of any attention?

If you are respected, you are linked to. Your words, your work and you yourself will have some value in the eyes of your niche audience. And here we smoothly go to the next benefit.

You will get backlinks. Not directly, because of the NoFollow aspect of links posted on social media platforms, but with the help of “mediators”. For example, you will promote your content or its extract on social media platforms. People will go to your website, if you attracted their attention, read your stuff and decide to share it on their websites. As a result, your domain authority will rise. However, always check your backlinks! Toxic or spammy links will cause harm to your website and rankings.

Use WebCEO’s Backlink Quality Check and be aware about the value of the links leading to your website.

IN CONCLUSION, social media platforms are among the most powerful instruments for marketing. The benefits you will get should easily be worthy of all the effort you are going to put in. If you still don’t use social media professionally, it’s high time to start doing this. Begin your journey with WebCEO’s Rank Tracking Tool, identify your competitors and build up a proper marketing strategy for your future success.

The post A Step by Step Guide to Social Media Optimization. Part 3 appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Part II: Writing a Post

In the previous part of the article we discussed the following points of social media optimization:

• Research,
• Target audience identification,
• Planning, and
• Social media profile optimization.

In short, that was the preparation stage.

Today in the second part, we will dive into one of the most essential parts of SMO: content creation and optimization.

Social media content isn’t the same as the content you create for websites. On social media platforms, certain rules apply. Length, style and visuals – here are just a few things to double-check and improve. This is where your creativity and passion are put in the spotlight.

It doesn’t matter what type of content you have been producing or are going to produce; social media accepts everything. You can run an educational channel or one for entertainment or news. There is a different strategy for each of these types of channels.

Step #1: How to Make Your Post Visible

[ Find your keywords and optimize your posts properly ]

Optimized social media profiles are undoubtedly important. However, you will never succeed if your posts aren’t seen by social media platform inhabitants. If you want to be noticed, use keywords.

Social media platforms work a bit like Google, exploiting keywords. However, social media’s most important keywords consist of hashtags. They should be relevant to your niche and popular among users:

There is a range of different services which can help you choose relevant and highly demanded hashtags in your niche.

Those are:

• WebCEO’s Keyword Research Tool which helps to find the best and most profitable keywords depending on the niche you perform in. It gives you suggestions on what people look for besides your query. You can easily use these substitute queries as hashtags on social media:

Not only will more people find you in searches on the social media platform itself, but Google will often show social media posts in their results if a relevant hashtag is used, like this:

• Keyhole is a good site to gather analytical data on hashtags and track results of a social media hashtag campaign; 
• Flick shows hashtag statistics in terms of general and recent popularity, month and week trends, and will provide you with a list of relevant hashtags and where they are mostly used.

Pick the best keywords with WebCEO's Keyword Research Tool Sign Up Free

Step #2: How to Behave on Different Social Media Platforms

[ Learn how to optimize your social media like a pro and use it to the fullest ]

Social media is the easiest and fastest way to spread any kind of information.

Each social media platform is used by a specific audience. You must be careful because a wrongly prepared post will have weak results. Analyze properly who uses each social media platform in terms of age, location, nationality, etc.

Each platform has its rules and features, so you should follow the game:

X (TWITTER) POSTS

Age group: 25 – 34

Since Twitter sets limit of 280 characters for a single tweet, think wisely about each word you are going to type. Each post should contain a relevant hashtag or two, so the number of characters will be reduced even more.

Surprisingly, too many tweets will actually work against you. Users don’t like their content diluted. Three or four posts per day should be enough.

There are a lot of other useful features on Twitter you can use for your marketing campaign along with hashtags. Look, please, at the screenshot below. There you can see some options to use in order to make a post more engaging:

• Photos and videos: people absolutely fall for various types of content. Make your post entertaining, interesting, and bright! Attach short, yet funny videos or photos for an ordinary follower to watch with pleasure!

Remember to optimize your image size so that those will load faster. Avoid posting photos or videos people are likely to have seen before or, worse, think they have seen before. Snap your own photos before borrowing one from the Internet. Get a photogenic friend or employees to do various things with various tools and emotions so you’ll have a library of compelling shots others have definitely never seen before.

• GIFs: These 1 to 2 second mini-videos are a lot of fun and very popular. Relevant and witty GIFs will make your post attractive and hilarious!
• Polls: people like polls because they like to share their opinions. These are also a great way to check the level of engagement on your Twitter and maybe learn what products people prefer to use in terms of your niche;
• Location: if your business is location-focused, you can add the exact location to a post or mention it in hashtags in order to analyze how much your product is demanded in a specific area:

• Threads: this will definitely come in handy if you want to share a big amount of information on Twitter and don’t want this data to be lost in a long line of replies. You can “attach” tweets to the main post and those will be the first on a queue.

How can Twitter help to increase traffic and extend your audience?

You are likely to benefit from followers’ and hashtag searchers’ actions: likes, retweets, replies, tags, embedded tweets, and other.

Track Twitter mentions of your brand and products with WebCEO Sign Up Free

FACEBOOK POSTS

Age group: 18 – 34

Facebook is one of the most comfortable places to run a business campaign and sell your content. Facebook works well even with local SEO.

Facebook is all about reactions and discussion. It is actually used by all generations since its main goal is communication. Create posts that are highly engaging: ask questions, inspire people to leave their feedback, like, share your posts, or just thank you for great content. As Facebook is created for communication between friends, give followers the opportunity to set a connection with you like with a close buddy.

On Facebook you can use a large set of features to promote your content or products. Let’s learn some more about them:

• Live video: if you a running a presentation open to the public, you will not find a more comfortable way to share it than use social media. This is easy, comfortable, and all encompassing in terms of an audience being able to search for and find you. Insert hashtags to the posts with webinars or live videos, to make finding you easier.
• Photo/video: the classic way of sharing your content. Got anything your audience would love to see? Post photos. Videos are even better.
• Life event: a great feature to bring some attention to your product and your actual location:

In the post itself:

• Feeling/Activity: not a really useful feature for optimization, but it may stir some reaction from followers and make them ask questions, like or comment on your actions:

• Tag people: invite people you want to react to your posts. Naturally, you should avoid tagging random people who have nothing to do with you or your page.
• Polls are similar to those on Twitter where people like to share their opinions.
• Check in: a location feature that specifies where an event/photo/video, etc. takes place, a useful option for location-focused businesses.

Add Facebook Insights data to your marketing mix with WebCEO Sign Up Free

INSTAGRAM POSTS

Age group: 18 – 24

Instagram is now especially favored by people interested in their local environment. The post optimization on this platform is similar to other ones mentioned earlier. Except for:

• There are a set of filters which help users to make their images prettier before publishing, and
• Carousels – a set of several photos or videos within one post.

Instagram allows live videos and STORIES. People like these update features and use them a lot. Follow their example.

Adopt the strategy of posting regular stories. They attract people even more than pictures on profiles! Trends are changing daily, and now people tend to create more stories and make posts only on special occasions. You may use a wide range of possibilities which this way of updating provides you with:

• Location;
• Mentions;
• Hashtags;
• Polls, questions, and quizzes;
• Gifs and stickers;
• Countdown;
• Music, and other.

You can upload a video or an image to your story, even insert links leading to specific websites.

Stories don’t live too long, only for 24 hours. However, if you want them to be permanent and visible on your profile, you can add them to the Story Highlights, where they will live as long as you want them to:

YOUTUBE VIDEOS

Age group: 18 – 75 (18 – 44 make up 90%)

YouTube is you. As long as you are unique, fresh, and entertaining. Nowadays, YouTube is a really powerful platform that embraces almost all the niches in this world. And as there are a lot of representatives of your field, you have to stand out and prove that your content is much better and worthy of being viewed.

The things you can optimize on YouTube:

• Hashtags: these are needed on each platform you are going to use and optimize. Remember, hashtags should be relevant to your niche and topic:

• Video itself: it should be of the highest quality in terms of content presented and resolution. People – your potential customers – prefer enjoying nice pictures, compelling commentary and valuable data, so make sure to meet their requirements. Create playlists by topics and add each new video to the appropriate playlist, so that users may find them quickly:

• Transcript: convert your audio into text. This is very useful for users because some of them may be foreigners, or your speech may be difficult to understand. And this works well for SEO. By doing transcripts for your videos, you help Google crawl and index it. Speak with keywords and then transcribe your words. Help Google show your video as an answer to a searcher’s query.

• Translation: if you own or work for an international company, do not be lazy: translate your video into some of the most widespread languages. A wider audience will have the opportunity to understand you and learn more about your product. This will help you to get the highest search result positions in different locations.

And a live video:

• Basic info: here you are limited to 5000 characters. The description box is really useful, so exploit it undoubtedly! What you can type there:

1. Keywords in title, description itself, and tags:

2. Place links to your website and other social media platforms accounts;

3. Links to materials you used for a video;

4. Notes about important events related to your brand;

5. A brief script of your video with the times you mention certain things – people like this a lot;

YouTube has a lot you can optimize.

Make time to care about each of the underlined points below. These will help you get more value out of using YouTube and feature higher on YouTube search:

People like to leave comments on YouTube, whether they are bad or good ones. Be polite with everybody because it helps to increase the level of engagement and shows that everybody is respected at your place.

Do you know that YouTube is the second most popular search engine after Google? According to Global Media Insight, YouTube has more than 2.7 billion active users. If we can’t find what we want on Google, we will jump to YouTube and find it there.

WebCEO understands the importance of YouTube and other platforms in contemporary 2020+ SEO and tries to embrace all the channels you can potentially get some traffic from and optimize your content for. In the WebCEO Rank Tracker Tool, you can easily monitor your YouTube performance with a few clicks, adding it to a list of search engines you can work with. After a fresh scan, you will be able to enjoy a full report regarding your keyword performance on YouTube.

Check your YouTube rankings with WebCEO Sign Up Free

LINKEDIN POSTS

Age group: 18 – 49

LinkedIn is all about being official. Here you present and sell your professionalism. Time to humblebrag and describe why you are a great specialist or why your company is worthy of attention. Don’t be shy!

After filling out the forms regarding your experience and achievements, it will be time to learn how to optimize your posts. If you use a company account, some features of the ordinary posts are not available, for example articles.

Since LinkedIn is more official than other social media platforms you have to present your content thoughtfully. Work on the presentation of your idea a lot, let it be professional, of high quality, and structured so your readers will be compelled to join the conversation and express their opinion regarding a chosen topic. Ask interesting and intriguing questions, challenge readers to take part in your considerations and let them prove whether you are right or wrong. This will bring more engagement. 

You can make your post fully optimized by following the next tips:

• Keywords should be everywhere! Hashtags in your posts make them visible to the users, even if they are not your followers or aren’t connected to you.

• Photos and videos make posts brighter and attract more attention to your content. Be sure to add alt text to your images for better accessibility.

• Articles: this feature lets you share your knowledge with the others and proving that you are indeed a professional in your niche.   

• Share a document: If you have a guide, a PowerPoint presentation or another valuable piece of content, you can easily share it and let the search engines index its content. People will come to you more often knowing you can provide them with well written and useful material. If you don’t want everybody to see and examine your material, you can easily set a limited access to the post;

• Access: in a box under your photo, you have the Access feature. You can decide on who can see the post you are going to publish. If you want to attract as many people as you can, choose “Anyone + Twitter” option, and your post will emerge on your Twitter account as well. 

Make sure you haven’t blocked the comments section and people are able to leave some words regarding your content!

A little BONUS

SlideShare

If you have a lot of in-demand and in-depth content, like presentations, documents, infographics, try SlideShare. It is owned by LinkedIn’s hosting service and is an easy way to spread your content and bring some attention. On SlideShare such features as likes and shares are also available. You can insert links leading to your social media platforms on a SlideShare profile, so people will know where to find you.

PINTEREST PINS

Age group: 18 – 49

Pinterest is all about images. How can this platform be useful for product promotion? All images are supplied with links to their original websites and short descriptions.

Pinterest is a little bit easier than other platforms in terms of content presentation. Let’s dive into it without further ado:

• Images: choose an awesome photo relevant to your business niche, bright and of high quality, and catchy enough for an ordinary user to notice it. Actually, this is the most important part you have to do on Pinterest. Be careful with photos and don’t steal them from other people!
• Title: it’s more than just the name of your image. Write anything you want (relevant to your content of course) to present your image and article to the audience in the most interesting way. The title is also a place for keywords with the help of which people will find your pin.

• Links: there are two places where your links are visible:
  • in the image as you hover a cursor over it, and
  • under the image:

• Description: here you have 500 characters to present your content (be creative!) and interest viewers to learn more. Don’t forget to put keywords in this box.
• Boards are similar to playlists on YouTube with pins replacing videos. This is really useful for followers and beneficial for you because people may observe more of your older pins, which are related to a newer one.

Track Pinterest likes and shares of images on your site with WebCEO Sign Up Free

Step #3: When to Post on Social Media?

[ Choose the right time for your posts ]

Scheduling posts is also an important part of the whole optimization process. A lot of specialists compose their posts in advance, working on each word and preparing respectable material. With a feature for post scheduling, such as on Facebook and YouTube, this process becomes significantly easier.

You can determine the best time for your business to post on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other platforms after reading some articles on this topic.

Why don’t we just tell you what are the best times to post?

The audience isn’t the same everywhere. What may be a great time for one type of audience could be the worst variant for another. Everything depends on your products, your target audience, and its location. Time Zones are obviously extremely important for your performance on social media.

How to find the best time periods for posting?

Trial and error.

Do you remember those words about starting your social media optimization long before the specific campaign you are about to run? This time can be devoted to experiments and gathering statistics. This will help you to determine your audience’s “chill out time”: the time when they are best able to soak in your material. You will learn what times during the day are the “busiest” and the “freest”: when readers enjoy your posts to the fullest and when they just miss them. Besides, at the same time, you can track other types of vital statistics: age and location of the readers.

The frequency of posting: specialists have come to the conclusion that it is better to post more than once a day. However, do not create a huge wave of posts; otherwise you will annoy your readers. 3-4 posts per day are enough to stay visible.

Shares also count and should also be optimized. If you repost something, express your opinion. People follow you for your thoughts and ideas, so even when you repost and share others’ material, your added comment should reflect you.

Twitter, of course, is in a league of its own. On this platform, less is more, and people can express their opinion even in three words. However, it’s okay to be more talkative on Twitter if it’s about your industry.

IN CONCLUSION, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn and others have become increasingly significant avenues for your content promotion. Experience and hard work matter. If you start a campaign on your own, you will quickly pick up the essentials, improve your skills and work on your social media professionally.

The WebCEO Keyword Research Tool will help you choose the right keywords for your posts and stories so that you will be seen by the right audience!

TO BE CONTINUED…

The post A Step by Step Guide to Social Media Optimization, Part 2 appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Part I: Let’s Conduct Some Research

Social media has taken control of our lives. A large number of Internet users nowadays can’t imagine living without chilling out on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Statistics says that:

• Over 62% of the worldwide population use social media;
• The average time for chilling out on social media is about 2:22 hours per day;
• 71% of customers are satisfied with purchasing goods via social media and would recommend a company or a brand to their closest people.

These are the aspects that make social media platforms an extremely profitable field for promoting products, brands, or services.

Using Social media for business these days is indispensable. Even if you already run a successful website on the Internet, you should still raise awareness about your existence on social media platforms. Your activity there greatly affects your site rankings and can often deliver 25% of your overall traffic.

The problem is how to do this properly. How do you optimize your social media and get more revenue?

Social media isn’t about a single funny post on your profile which, you may suppose, will instantly attract an enormous and interested audience for your content. Let’s be honest: it happens, but it’s the exception rather than the rule. Social media business posts will need to be in the hundreds, if not thousands, and the process consists of: work, strategy, and proper organization.

Social media users have become more capricious and used to various types of content presentation. You will have to devote a lot of effort and spend a lot of time to bring something new and amusing to the public, keep your current and future audiences on your side, and leave your competitors far behind.

And we can’t discuss post optimization without mentioning social media optimization in general. Your posts will shine bright only if you prepare a field for them, a place for growing and living. Don’t wait for fruit to sprout without any effort.

There are several steps you will have to take to make your social media accounts relevant, profitable, and popular.

LET’S CONDUCT SOME RESEARCH!

Step #1: What Is Important to Know About Working on Social Media

[ Prepare your team for hard work ]

91% of small businesses use social media to promote their business.

Social media platforms need the kind of attention you will pay to your own website. Experienced social media marketers can name hundreds of reasons why people should use social media for promoting their goods. We are going to save you time and present only the most essential reasons:

1. Nothing will give your brand a more powerful advertisement and a greater boost than social media.

Your brand’s popularity may rise dramatically in a matter of seconds with a proper marketing campaign. It’s a fact that social networks help attract new consumers, increase authority, and bring trust to your goods, brand and company.

2. You will get the opportunity to widen the circle of your customers.

Social media is undergoing constant development. Developers try to make these platforms the most convenient places not only for leisure, but also for business. By drawing people in day and night, many of your targeted followers will be around at any time to see something you post. Your products will be shown directly to this targeted segment of purchasers.

3. Your brand/company will become recognizable due to constant online visibility.

Social media platforms are awesome venues on which to conduct marketing campaigns, because they leave a record. Posts, shares, reposts – everything stays visible on profiles until a user deletes something. It allows people to take a close look at what your company was in the past and is now. Help potential customers learn about you and get a lot of benefit.

4. Managing social media, you will open a communication channel with your audience.

A modern and mobile-friendly website does not always equal a comfortable place for users to be active in the comments section. On the other hand, social media is designed perfectly for this, and that is why people do not hesitate to readily leave their feedback, like your posts and share them. The greatest thing is that you will be alarmed instantly if there are any actions to take and you can reply to them at any moment, even start a conversation in private messages. Followers appreciate it when their opinion is noticed and considered important.

After analyzing the benefits of social media marketing and how crucial it is, IT’S TIME TO GET TO WORK. Maintaining social media accounts is no easy task!

1. Be ready to work hard and spend a lot of time on brainstorming. Your team should always be aware of the latest trends, people’s interests, and know how to present content on any given platform.

2. Before starting the process of optimization, set specific goals to be achieved. This brings extra motivation and lights the path for you to follow and complete the task.

3. Develop a successful social media strategy. At this stage you should analyze and use your competitors!

Identify your rivals with WebCEO’s Rank Tracking Tool. Click on the Dangerous Competitors tab and enjoy the detailed report. Learn who you are going to compete with, who the most alarming ones are, and eventually get the better of them with the next step.

4. Track your competitors’ social media accounts. Here your real journey starts. Study the history of their posts from top to bottom, the level of engagement and what were and are the reasons of their success. An important task in this phase is to go through their feedback and – especially – complaints. Take this into account while developing your own strategy to avoid any mistakes and stand out decently.

5. BEFORE starting your social media campaign, work on your website optimization. Needless to say that SMO (Social Media Optimization) is a great way to promote your business, however, the SMO and SEO cooperation will bring you more value. Through social media, people get acquainted with your products and even purchase them, but your website is the place where they really start trusting you.

Your site architecture, appearance, content, and other components of on and off page SEO matter a lot because first impressions matter. Make your website as attractive as your social media accounts.

Social Media matters. So does SEO. Take care of your site's SEO with WebCEO. Sign Up Free

Step #2: Where to Run Your Social Media Marketing Campaign

[ Identify your target audience and decide on a few social media platforms ]

Before making any attempt to promote a website on social media, you will have to identify your target audience. A target audience comprises the type of people you produce your product for. They are of a specific age, nationality, location, interest, and lifestyle. Your goal is to identify all those points and use them in your campaign.

“My product is for everybody” – if only. Genuinely all-purpose and everyday goods and services are rare. Coca-Cola used to imply it was the case for them, but there are identifiable demographics who drink soda a lot more or a lot less than others. Your product is made for a certain group of people, so your marketing campaign primarily should be based on the needs of this very group.

There are a lot of ways of identifying your target audience. We’ll outline some of them:

• Analyze your current audience. Gather data regarding you current followers and website subscribers. Knowing who is interested in your products at the moment, you can see right from the beginning who are among those you are going to work for in the future. Their interests and hobbies will help you decide on the direction and theme of your campaign. Google Analytics will help a lot with this:  

• Analyze your competitors’ current audiences. Your competitors promote goods that have similarities with yours, so you will have roughly the same circle of customers. Your task is to learn who is interested in their goods and yours besides the group of people you outlined from your current audience.
• Online Polls and Surveys are easy and fast ways to determine who would buy your goods. You can conduct them on your website, some other websites for a fee, and of course on social media platforms with appropriate hashtags.
• Analyze your own product. You should have determined your target audience at the stage of creating your product. Now think about people who may be interested in this besides those you originally considered. Learn who else may get any benefit from your product.
• Create a persona for your target audience: a general portrait of your target audience presented schematically as a person with a set of characteristics. It will be easier to work on your strategy when you have such a useful picture of potential clients. Here is an example:

After identifying your target audience, it’s high time to choose a platform that fits your campaign the most. However, our advice is to USE ALL AVAILABLE PLATFORMS. More likely than not, your customers spend their time on more than just one platform, and so should you.

Step #3: How to Optimize Your Social Media Profiles?

[ Make sure your social media account is ready to be popular ]

Most businesses maintain between 4 and 10 social profiles.

Social media profile creation is not a big deal: the two main components you have to work on are appearance (well-prepared posts) and optimized profiles. But you can’t start your marketing campaign until you have covered the following checklist:

1. Logo and cover image.

The first thing we do as soon as we enter any website is to look at its architecture and appearance. We look for colors and build a certain picture in our minds. Learning the content comes only after.

Optimize your social media profiles to make them easy on people’s eyes – bright and modern. And most importantly, use your own images! Never use stock photos in your profile nor any of your posts. Spend some time to take your own pictures or design your own cartoons, so people will recognize your style everywhere.

2. Business name.

People should know who owns the page, so place your company’s official name for people to know who they have met.

3. Bio or “About” information.

Present information about your company in a short, yet appealing way. List the essential information with your most important keywords and go to the next step.

4. Niche.

On some social media, you can mention the category (niche) your company performs in. If your company is not popular enough yet, don’t miss this part! Even world-renowned companies like Coca-Cola or Starbucks specify their sphere of activity, so why shouldn’t you? Of course, on some platforms, selecting a category is mandatory.

5. Links to a website and other social media platforms.

Always place a link to your website on your social media accounts! All your marketing goals in social media involve people visiting your website (although some businesses only need to have people call their phone number). After all, most of the information about your company and a full list of your products are on your website.

Some platforms allow you to insert links and even have special boxes for them. Use this chance for sure! Everything is for your followers’ convenience.

5. Make it easy to reach you.

Followers and potential customers will appreciate the option to ask a direct question or write some feedback privately. Make it possible and don’t worry about spammers, you can block them if need be.

Moreover, via non-public messages, you can receive a profitable offer from another company, or a good idea from an interested follower. LinkedIn messaging can produce more business for a company than email itself. Always check your social media inboxes.

6. Take your time to prepare.

If you are planning to start a social media marketing campaign in the future, begin the process of optimization at least a few months beforehand. Start making posts, uploading videos and images in order to gather relevant followers and test the waters of audience reaction to your product.

For instance, on Twitter you should have spent a few months following relevant people, unfollowing those who did not follow back and following more relevant people. Be sure to follow/invite those in your database if you have one.

Take a good look at the screenshots below to learn what social media profile optimization entails:

• Facebook:

• Twitter:

• Instagram:

• YouTube:

• LinkedIn:

• Pinterest:

Summary

If you want to join social media and start promoting your business, only wanting is not enough. First and foremost, social media optimization needs YOU: your time, your creativity, your contribution.

You should begin with research and planning. If you want to create a powerful and pleasing place for visitors, you will have to put yourself into data searching and processing. An accurate examination of your business possibilities on social media platforms and your competitors will clear the road to success.  

Proceed with identifying and analyzing your audience. The right people attracted to the right places in the best case scenario will bring you traffic, recognition and customers. When we are talking about Internet use, there are two places where we all party hard most of the time: on websites we like and on social media. Use these two. Become that very liked website lots of traffic after getting loved on social media. These are two components of your strategy.

And finally: optimize your profiles and then go right to the next step: writing a post on social media.

Start your research with the WebCEO Rank Tracking Tool by identifying and analyzing your competitors!

Find your most Dangerous Competitors Sign Up Free

TO BE CONTINUED…

The post A Step by Step Guide to Social Media Optimization. Part 1 appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

The SEO and social media departments of many brands often operate as their own entities. In reality, however, the two are inextricably linked. As such, they should work in unison, aligning their strategies, processes, and goals. How can you improve your social media optimization by using SEO-friendly copywriting?

Let’s explore how it’s done on some of the most popular social networks.

Wait, But What Do SEO and Social Media Have to Do With Each Other?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and social media are two distinct but interconnected aspects of digital marketing and online presence management. While they serve different purposes, they can work together to enhance your overall online visibility and brand authority. Here’s how they are related:

1. Content Promotion: Social media platforms are excellent channels for promoting your website’s content. When you create content on your website, such as blog posts, articles, or videos, sharing them on social media can help increase their visibility and drive more traffic to your site.
2. Backlinks and Authority: High-quality content shared on social media can attract attention from influencers, bloggers, and other website owners. If they find your content valuable, they may link to it from their own websites or blogs – which you can verify by scanning your backlinks.
3. Brand Awareness: A strong social media presence can help your brand become more recognizable, and this can indirectly benefit your SEO efforts. When people are familiar with your brand, they are more likely to search for it by name, which can lead to increased branded searches.
4. Engagement Signals: Social media platforms provide a way for users to engage with your content through likes, shares, comments, and click-throughs. When your content receives a high level of engagement on social media, it can indicate to search engines like Bing that your content is relevant and valuable to users, potentially improving your search rankings.
5. Local SEO: For businesses with physical locations, social media can be crucial for local SEO. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram allow businesses to create profiles with location information, reviews, and other details. Optimizing these profiles and encouraging positive reviews can improve your local search visibility.

How to Use SEO Copywriting for Social Media Optimization

In terms of SEO copywriting, you only need to follow two rules:
1. Use relevant keywords throughout your social media posts, including in the title, meta description, and body copy. Of course, you need to find keywords for your content first.
2. Write clear and concise content that is easy for users to scan and understand.
While social media optimization and SEO constitute a vast theme, this article aims to provide you with a foundation that will assist you in leveraging social media to promote your website. Let’s go!

Pinterest

Pinterest gets more than two billion searches a month. Woah. If you’re not optimizing your pins and profiles, you must do it to not miss out on serious traffic.

There are simple steps you can take to make significant progress. First, find relevant keywords.

Go to the search bar and start typing the general topic of your pin content. For instance, if you’re pinning a blog about the keto diet, start typing “keto diet” into the search bar. Here’s what you will see:

Not unlike Google, what you will see in that drop-down are related search queries people have actually typed in. In other words, Pinterest is helpfully handing you relevant and related keywords.

Pick one that makes sense for your pin. Then, use it in the:

• Pin title.
• Pin description.
• File name of the image you pin.

Word on the street is that Pinterest might even be analyzing the text on your pin image, so you might consider having the keyword there, like this:

(Source)

This isn’t the only place you can use optimized copy on Pinterest to increase your traffic and engagement. Your boards have titles and descriptions — how about putting some keywords in there?

Don’t forget that Pinterest also gives you a little space to share some information about yourself. This is another great place for a keyword.

Remember that Pinterest is also like Google when it comes to keyword stuffing, meaning don’t do it. It creates a bad experience for your visitors, it looks spammy, and the platform will take note of it and react accordingly.

P.S. Don’t forget to add a few hashtags!

YouTube

Google owns YouTube, and that should tell you how important it is to optimize your profile and the videos you post. Thankfully, YouTube gives you plenty of opportunities to do this.

YouTube SEO starts with finding the right keywords. Notice anything familiar?

Once you have a relevant keyword (or two), use it in your title and description, plus in the name of your video file, if possible.

Also, did you know that you can use hashtags in video titles and descriptions? They’re not just for show, either. They’re clickable and fully functioning. You can put them in your video descriptions, too.

This will make it easier for people to find you when they’re looking at videos that are related to yours. Bonus.

YouTube is quite literally Google for videos. If you don’t optimize content when posting videos, people won’t find you — period.

LinkedIn

It might not have all the bells and whistles that Instagram and Facebook do, but LinkedIn matters. If you’re on it and you’re not optimizing what you write, you’re missing out on traffic and engagement.

We know we’re starting to sound like a broken record here, but we’re going to say it again: keywords, keywords, keywords!

What’s the purpose of your LinkedIn page? What are you using it for. Let’s run through an example and say you’re a freelance social media manager looking for work.

If that’s the case, you want people who are interested in hiring a social media manager to find you when they look for candidates.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, you’re going to want to make sure the words “social media manager” are sprinkled throughout your page. This includes your:

• Headline.
• Bio/summary.
• Job descriptions under your employment history.

Considering we use LinkedIn for business purposes, you’re going to want to stack the odds as much in your favor as possible when it comes to making it easy for people to find you. Social media optimization is key.

X (Twitter)

When you think of using “keywords” on X, you probably think of hashtags. Those are indeed important, but they’re not the only way to optimize your tweet.

Notice what happens when we search “SEO tips.” For starters, the two pages featured at the top have #SEO — in their bios! Is this the only reason they’re featured? No. Does it help? Most likely.

Next, let’s look at the first three tweets that show up in the search results.

For the first result, the username — Seo Ranking Tips — contains our search term (SEO tips). In the second result, “SEO” is in the username and “tips” is in the tweet. In the third, “SEO tips” is in the tweet.

These aren’t even hashtags.

So, yes, Twitter is absolutely paying attention to the words you choose to put in your tweets and on your main profile page. Choose wisely!

Similar to Pinterest, it definitely can’t hurt to put relevant keywords into the file name of any pictures you tweet, as long as it makes sense.

Instagram

Create compelling visual content that complements your blog articles and videos. Use high-quality images and engaging visuals to capture your audience’s attention. A carousel with your article’s text will be a powerful tool to move traffic to your site and get a lot of MQLs. Furthermore, you must use emojis, but not too much. Research suggests that emojis make your content more memorable and also increase engagement.

Utilize the clickable link in your Instagram bio to direct users to your latest blog articles, videos, or landing pages. Ensure that the link is optimized for SEO and leads to valuable, relevant content.

Be active in communicating with your Instagram audience through comments, likes, and shares. High engagement rates can indirectly influence your SEO rankings, as search engines may interpret user engagement as a sign of content quality.

Another easy trick is to prioritize hashtags that get more engagement and traffic. Instagram itself tells you how many times a hashtag has been used, and tools like eClincher will measure their engagement.

Optimization in every social network is an art that needs to be learned over many years, especially Instagram. If you’ve never done it before, don’t hesitate to hire a professional to help you create social media profiles that will bring you profit.

Facebook

We love hashtags, and using them helps optimize your posts because it makes it easier for people to find you.

However, when it comes to Facebook, go easy on the hashtags. In fact, try laying off completely.

Research says that Facebook posts without hashtags perform better than posts with hashtags. Don’t worry, though. There are other ways you can optimize your page.

Fill your profile out in its entirety, including the About section and Our Story.

Also, be sure to incorporate important keywords that are relevant to your product or service. For instance, we have “social media management platform” in the first sentence of Our Story.

Now, are people using Facebook like a search engine to the same extent as we are on platforms like YouTube, Pinterest, and LinkedIn? No. But here’s the thing. Social media profiles often show up on page one of Google when people are looking for your business.

And, while we don’t have a conclusive answer, your social pages might be acting as quality backlinks — meaning they link back to your website. Google notices this.

Any way you cut it, social media optimization is important, and so is observing its results. Keep track of user activity and engagement on your Facebook page with the WebCEO Social Analytics Tool.

The post Social Media Optimization: How to Nail It with SEO Copywriting appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Content is the common thread tying together SEO and digital marketing. Want your website to be at the top of search results? Make great content. Want to sell something? Make great content. Since that’s where the two goals intersect, it’s clear that superior content is the gateway to greater rewards in each.

And video might just be the winning ticket you were looking for.

Want proof? The most prominent example is YouTube. Video content helped it become a giant on par with Google itself, enough to make YouTube SEO its own thing – to say nothing of all the ad revenue generated there. Video can be packed with more information than any other medium, which makes it such a potent tool in communication. And that’s what SEO, digital business and video marketing are all about: reaching and communicating with your audience.

Need more reasons to start using videos? Don’t worry, we’ve got plenty.

Video Marketing Statistics in 2022

“The 2020s will be the decade of video.” How I wish I had a dollar for every time I’d heard that over the previous decade. I’d have enough to make Elon Musk cry!

Two and some years into the new 20s, how is this prediction holding up? Spoiler alert: very accurate so far. Countless businesses have bet on video content and they did not regret it – quite the opposite, in fact. Numbers can do a great job describing the impact video has had on digital businesses – and, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Here is an infographic: the fruit of Renderforest‘s research on video content and how it has been used by businesses in the 2020s. Below the infographic itself, we are going to highlight the most impressive points.

1. Benefits of video content

Videos are widely used (and that’s an understatement). There are plenty of businesses and marketers to vouch for the benefits. What does the majority say?

Using videos in your marketing campaign increases:

• Return on investment
• Brand awareness
• Lead generation
• Site traffic

Every single thing that matters, as you can see.

85% of businesses use videos in marketing and consider them a vital part of their strategy. What’s more, videos have proven to be especially effective during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to 91% of marketers.

2. Video consumption

They didn’t lie when they said the 2020s would be the era of videos. Halfway and some into 2022, global video traffic is climbing past the 82% mark – as expected. And thanks to such a high percentage, we can see how users prefer their videos:

• 33% of viewers will stop watching a video after 30 seconds. That’s how little time you have to hook them in!
• 25% of viewers finish videos that are over 20 minutes long. Not great, not terrible.
• 75% of viewers prefer horizontal videos to vertical ones.

3. Types of videos

There are many kinds of videos out there. What do businesses prefer? How effective are those preferred kinds at their job?

• Explainer videos: these are used by 62% of businesses, as well as by 82% of B2B businesses. This type of video has an enormous audience: 94% of people who want to know more about the product will watch an explainer video. Also, 93% of millennial viewers love how-to videos.
• Logo animations: they are present in 46% of videos made by businesses, and in 58% of B2B business videos.
• Video ads: they are less common than you’d think. Only 38% of businesses use them!
• Demo videos: these are even less common, employed by 33% of businesses.
• The 3 most popular types of videos are webinars, demos and social videos.
• And the most effective types (as reported by businesses) are informative and entertaining.

4. Videos and platforms

Now, everybody knows YouTube is king when it comes to videos. But what about other places?

It turns out businesses use videos quite effectively on their own sites. Putting a video on a landing page can increase your conversions by up to 80%!

What’s more, having a video on your landing page increases its chances of appearing on Google’s first SERP by 53%. Naturally, that includes homepages.

And here’s my favorite part: videos are effective even in emails!

44% of people are willing to watch a video included in an email. In fact, a video can increase an email’s CTR by up to a whopping 300%.

However, only 25% of businesses use videos in email marketing as of now (partly due to people being cautious about spam in emails, but that’s where verification tools like SPF record checkers come in). Sounds like a powerful, untapped niche you could use!

5. Videos on social media

We’ve seen how effective landing pages and emails can be. But when you want to post a video somewhere, what comes to mind? YouTube first, social media second, right?

Let’s look at the numbers.

• 81% of social media users say videos are their favorite type of content.
• 75% of people are more likely to follow a brand’s page if it has video content.
• For 74% of businesses, their videos receive the most engagement in social media.
• Twitter in particular is going through a video Renaissance of sorts: its video views are 220 times greater in 2022 than last year.
• Lastly, 56% of businesses post at least 5 videos per month on their social media.

Afterword

I think it won’t be long before augmented reality becomes the next booming trend. But for now, video content is king, and these statistics should be enough to convince you. It can be tough to make a good video, but this type of content has the highest ROI – that’s a proven fact.

When you are making a video, have fun! The audience respects professionals who love their work. Enjoy what you do, and the viewers will happily join in for the ride.

Additionally, you can use WebCEO’s SEO content assistant to ensure your video content reaches its maximum potential audience.

The post Video Marketing: The Future of SEO (Infographic) appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

There’s always been a lot of argument around how social media affects SEO. Despite the fact that Google renounced social signals as a ranking factor, websites with lots of activity on social platforms tend to rank higher than those without. Clearly, they must be doing something right? However, most SEOs agree that there are proper and improper ways of utilizing social media, and a ranking boost isn’t guaranteed if you manage your pages without giving it much thought.

Why is that? Because all websites are different, as are the social networks. Sometimes they aren’t a good match, and your campaign on Facebook, or Twitter, or LinkedIn suffers as a result. What is the best social media for SEO, and which social platform is the best for your business in particular? These questions can be answered only by looking at the platforms individually and exploring their strengths and weaknesses. Below are some of the most popular social networks that SEOs use.

Facebook: Where All Types of Content Are Equally Loved

On the top of our list is Facebook, the most popular social media platform in the world. The number of its users has exceeded 2 billion this year, and it keeps expanding. That’s almost two Chinas! Keep up the good work, Facebook folks.

With such a large user base, Facebook is the most obvious choice for website owners with ulterior motives. Need to make a first contact with your target audience and let them know you come in peace? Blue pastures will welcome you with open arms. Facebook allows so many ways to submit content that it’s closer to a forum than a social network. You know, if forums allowed you to advertise your brand.

Using Facebook for SEO or business purposes (thankfully, those often overlap) involves creating a business page if you are promoting a brand or a simple group page if it’s something more ordinary like a blog. That’s in addition to creating a page for your own person, if you intend to be the admin; otherwise someone else will have to run your website’s Facebook page. A custom name is preferable since it will be used in the page’s URL and fulfil the role of a keyword. Once you are done filling out all the necessary information (the more detailed it is, the better), the preparations are complete.

Note that you shouldn’t use a personal page as the main frontline of your Facebook SEO activities. Groups and business pages are much better suited for the task; personal pages will do for commenting, liking and sharing the updates.

Now it’s time to communicate with your target audience. We’ve covered the “what”…now we can go through the “how”.

1. Post high-quality content. I know you’ve heard the phrase “content is king” a thousand times already, and I can repeat it again. Linking to high-quality content on your own site works, too; in fact, there’s no point in *not* doing it. But you have to always make sure you are giving your audience something that is well worth their time and will make them want to come back for more.

2. Post often and regularly. It’s another way of saying “strike the iron while it’s hot”. Don’t let the iron get cold, or your audience will become disinterested, and you’ll be back to square one.

3. Make your content engaging. Internet users love participating in what they find online. Create opportunities for a conversation between you and your audience. It could be as simple as asking them for their opinion (e.g. a poll), or you could try something more sophisticated like uploading a photo of your favorite city and asking users to share theirs. The payoff for your imagination will be immense.

4. Include images. Visual information is processed by users faster than raw text. Users are more likely to share a post with a funny or interesting picture than one without anything to spice it up.

These recommendations are more or less the same for all other social platforms. Naturally, there are differences and exceptions, which I’m going to cover.

YouTube: Excellent Videos Need Excellent Keywords

Here’s the other social media giant. Of course, it’s different from the rest because it accepts only one type of content: videos. Text is pushed on the back burner, static pictures got an even worse deal, but that’s no reason to underestimate YouTube as a promotion platform. It gets 30 million users a day; how can you not be tempted to harness such power? Rev up your video editing software and start selling yourself!

YouTube uses a number of factors to evaluate a video’s position in search results. As you can imagine, they all indicate how well a video is received by its viewers, so giving your audience something nice to watch should be your main concern. Quality is measured by:

• Views
• Percentage of the video watched
• Comments
• Subscribes after watching
• Shares
• Thumbs up and thumbs down

However, YouTube videos are also picked up by Google and displayed in its search results, too. Logic dictates that it makes sense to optimize your videos for Google, as well. This may be the easiest part because all it comes down to is keywords. Long-tail keywords that go in the video’s title and description. Surprisingly easy, right? To find the best long-tail keywords for your content, explore WebCEO’s Keyword Research Tool.

Twitter: Strength in Followers and #Hashtags

It’s amazing how a social media platform known for its notoriously short messages managed to make it so big. Was it the element of surprise? But I digress. In case you haven’t heard, Twitter has increased their character limit to 280, isn’t that nice of them?

Twitter and SEO have a somewhat shaky relationship because not all tweets get indexed by Google. That’s no reason to give up on keyword research, of course: neither in your tweets, nor in your profile information. But Twitter has its own well-known equivalent of keywords called hashtags (words with the # sign in front of them), and that’s what is mainly used to find specific tweets on the site. Guess what you need to include in your tweets to make sure they are seen by as many people as possible? Hashtags are the means towards attracting more followers and expanding your audience, and a large number of followers is the factor that tells Google that the tweets from this person deserve to be indexed.

Of course, you can’t rely on hashtags alone. In order to progress with your expansion campaign on Twitter, you need to actively look for users to follow. If you share interests with them, they are much more likely to follow you in return. Make sure to include your hobbies and occupation in your personal info to help your potential followers decide to stop being potential!

LinkedIn: Business Club with a Blog as a Bonus

LinkedIn is Facebook’s older and more mature brother. Less fun, more business-like and professional. Its profiles look like CVs more than anything else. In fact, they are CVs both in form and purpose. You have a much greater chance to find a job on LinkedIn than on any other social media platform, and even if that’s not your intention, you should set up your personal profile, groups and company pages with that mindset. This is a playground for serious kids.

The good news about LinkedIn is that it comes with its own blog platform which you can use if you don’t feel like creating a blog on your own site. Or maybe the role of writing posts for your company’s official blog belongs to someone else, in which case you could write additional original content for LinkedIn’s blog and give your website more online exposure (especially since Google indexes LinkedIn blog posts). The benefits are rather transparent.

Filling out your personal information is greatly encouraged as it increases the chances of your profile appearing in LinkedIn’s search results. Joining groups and participating in discussions is also a must, as it works towards building a stronger presence for you and your brand.

Pinterest and Instagram: Let the Visuals Sell

I am lumping those two together because they share many similarities, both being visual social platforms. At the same time, it’s fun to talk about the differences between them. Shall we begin?

As is the case with other platforms, you start with picking a username, keeping in mind that it will be used in your account’s URL and work as a keyword. Your profile name that will be displayed on the screen is a keyword, too. If you are making a page for your company, its logo is the best candidate for the profile picture, and don’t forget to introduce yourself or your brand in the bio.

You can also add a link to your website on your profile page, and on Instagram, it will be the only link you’ll be able to add anywhere. Pinterest is a lot more generous in this regard: it lets you freely add (or “pin”) images and videos from external resources, automatically attaching links to them.

Your content’s primary selling point will be the visual aspect. What you upload or pin will decide how well your updates will be shared by other users. Titles and especially descriptions come a close second. Choose titles that would be easily found by users and descriptions that are thoughtful and also easy to find by performing a search. Naturally, it goes without saying that the text in them should be optimized with keywords.

You can mark your Instagram galleries with hashtags for discoverability. Evidently, a hashtag with your brand’s name will make it more discoverable. Pinterest, on the other hand, doesn’t use hashtags.

You can also make your Instagram updates automatically appear on your Facebook page by connecting the accounts.

For Pinterest, it’s recommended to verify your website in order to give it priority over non-verified ones in search results, and to use rich pins which provide more information and have a better visibility.

As a downside, Pinterest has a smaller user base than Instagram – in fact, smaller than most other social platforms. On a brighter side, the link to your site in your profile will be dofollow! Such a nice treat is worth putting some effort in winning over Pinterest’s audience.

Even though this list of social platforms is far from being complete, you can see that each of them requires its own specific approach. But knowledge is power, and keeping yourself informed about the lands you are conquering is the key to winning the top positions in Google. Beyond that, it’s a matter of creativity and optimism. May you always be good friends with both, and see you on page 1!

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The post SEO + Social = Married: Are You Maintaining the Relationship? appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

In 2016, 88% of B2B companies were doing some form of content marketing. This number is only going to increase. Optimizing your website for search will help, but it won’t guarantee visibility. This is why you should try to make constantly generated content visible to as many people as possible, on and off your site. And how do we that?

The answer is content distribution. Creating content and waiting for it to rank organically is not sufficient. More so when you are starting out.

No amount of other SEO activity can make up for the benefits of content distribution and the traffic it brings.

Content distribution is not merely about sharing your content on social media or sending it out along with your newsletter. Both these avenues are highly crowded, making it difficult to grab your audience’s attention.

It is time to explore the lesser-known options. Here are a few tips to help you get started:

1. Niche content submission communities

Merely sharing your content on social media alone will not fetch you too much traffic. Most of the time, the visibility of these posts will be limited to your followers. One way to get more out of your social media efforts is to submit your content to pages or groups where your audience members regularly visit.

This could be in the form of discussion threads, dedicated hashtags, Twitter chats, subreddits, groups, pages, etc. The people who follow these conversations are highly engaged. Therefore, the chances of them checking out your content will be higher.

The key here is to make sure you don’t appear too promotional. There are many content submission websites as well which you can take advantage of.

Utilizing WebCEO’s Submission Tool can also help you identify potential websites and communities where your content can be submitted.

2. Optimize your social sharing snippets, cover images, meta description, and the first line of your content

Though this is more of a content creation tip, it plays a key role in content distribution as well. Most of the times, these are your audience’s first touch point with your content. You have to give the audience a reason to go ahead and read it.

Here are a few tips to help you do this:

• Make your cover image more interesting.
• A/B test your social snippets.
• Make your first line interesting and authentic – ask questions, add new and relevant statistics, mention a problem your audience faces regularly and how you are going to solve it, share a personal story, etc.
• Learn to optimize your content for social media using Yoast SEO. Enhancing your content’s visibility on social media can be significantly improved by analyzing your social metrics, which helps in understanding what type of content resonates most with your audience.

3. Optimize share button positions

It is crucial that you place the share buttons above the fold. Keeping it at the beginning or the end is fine, but it is tedious for users to scroll all the way down or up to share your content.

Instead, keep your social share buttons floating, so that it always stays above the fold. The key here is to ensure that it doesn’t obstruct the content or hamper the reading experience, especially on mobile.

• Here’s how to add floating share buttons without any WordPress plugin.
• Here’s how to add floating share buttons with WP plugins for your WordPress SEO needs.

4. Slack communities

Slack is one of the most popular office communication tools available. But that’s not all. With its ever-increasing user base, more and more people are setting up or joining Slack communities.

They are basically Slack channels where people from different organizations come together to discuss and learn more about a specific topic. It could be related to anything from marketing to tech documentation. You can either start a new community or join existing ones.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind while using Slack for distributing content:

• Before you start distributing your content, make sure you build rapport with fellow channel members.
• You need to stay active and interact with fellow channel members regularly.
• Don’t be overtly self-promotional.
• Regularly read articles shared by fellow members and offer your feedback for them.
• Make sure you follow Slack etiquettes while communicating with fellow members.
• Make sure the content you share is relevant and helpful to fellow members.

A few communities that you could check out.

5. Reach out to people who have shared similar content

This is a great way to push your content to a set of people who are more likely to find your content useful. Firstly, pick out a few top ranking pieces of content that deal with the same topic to what you published. Make sure they contain outdated information.

Then, identify people who shared them recently. Reach out to them, saying that you have new and updated content dealing with the same topic and that they might find it useful. The likelihood of them checking out your content and sharing it will definitely be higher.

6. Use the Custom Audience feature

Social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest have a custom audience feature. This allows users to identify and target people who have engaged with your website or your social network pages before. As the audience is interested and familiar with the content you produce, it will be easier for them to click on your ads.

Best Practice – identify people who have visited a particular section of your blog. Then, when you publish similar content, make sure you promote it to that particular section of the audience.

Here’s a guide to Facebook’s custom audience feature.

7. Leverage your mentions

Most of the time when you publish content, you will have a few outbound links. It could be a quote from an influencer, findings from a particular research paper, link to the website of a relevant tool. This helps make your content more trustworthy, helpful, etc.

What we forget is that we can leverage these links to promote our content. Reach out to these people and let them know about the mention. As you’ve done them a favor, this may lead to reciprocity and they may end up promoting your content. You may even get a newsletter mention if the quality of your content is high.

8. Use customer messaging platforms

These tools are mostly used for customer communication. But, they can also be used for content marketing too – right from idea generation to delivering content. These services are normally used by an audience who are engaged and are in need of the content. So, placing their search keywords in your content will definitely improve your SEO.

It can be very helpful for content distribution too. When customers ask for help, don’t restrict your answers to FAQs. Instead, take this opportunity to send them relevant, educational, and motivational content like best practices, real life examples etc. The immediacy and relevancy makes them a great platform to distribute your content.

Here’s how Intercom uses their own tool to do this.

9. Email series

Email is a great channel to distribute your content. Even though newsletters are ideal, getting readers to click is becoming more and more difficult. This is why we should start using an email series every now and then.

When you have written a really helpful article filled with actionable tips, instead of publishing it on your blog, divide it into an email series and send it out to your subscribers. It could be done on a weekly or daily basis. The language used should be that of a 5th grader – simple and clear. The article should not be published on your blog until the series is over. Again, it is all about adding value right in their inbox. And you will want to combine this with call to actions to buy your product or extend their service subscription with you.

You can use tools like MailChimp and ConvertKit to set up such an email series.

Wrapping up

Content distribution needs to be taken seriously. Doing it for its own sake will not cut it anymore. You need to actively find new ways to improve the reach of your content. You will have to be creative and dedicated. Above all, it requires persistence and perseverance.

You shouldn’t stop once you think you have achieved your expectations. You have to keep going on and on. There are always new platforms and techniques waiting to be found.

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Companies these days tend to have their own page on at least one social network. Many SEOs recommend being active on social media as much as possible: it’s said to boost your website’s position in SERPs. Despite that, the status of social media activity as a ranking factor remains a controversial topic. Does being active in social media help you rank in Google or not? Contradicting statements on the subject from Matt Cutts only served to add fuel to the fire and distressed SEOs who had poured their resources into social media campaigns.

We do use Twitter and Facebook links and ranking, as we always have, in our web search rankings. – Cutts, 2010

…As far as doing special, specific work to sort of say, “you have this many followers on Twitter or this many likes on Facebook”, to the best of my knowledge, we don’t currently have any signals like that in our web search ranking algorithms. – Cutts again, 2014

I haven’t experienced trust issues of this magnitude since the day I opened Grandma’s box of cookies (you know the one) and actually found cookies inside.

Why is this a topic for debate? Because almost everything we know about SEO came from researching what works and what doesn’t. We would’ve given up on social media long ago if we were convinced there wasn’t any point in sticking with it. Whether or not it deserves to be called off-page optimization, the positive influence of social media activity on websites is a certain known.

8 SEO-Improving Perks of Using Social Media

1. New pages on your site get indexed faster

A newly created page needs to be added to Google’s index before it can appear in search results. In order to be indexed, there has to be at least one link pointing to it – and if it’s in a place that’s often crawled by Google’s spiders, all the better. Among such places are… you guessed it: social networks.

The simplest example is a blog. If your website has a blog, you absolutely should share links to your new posts in social media (like we do). They’ll get crawled in a matter of minutes, which is nice in itself… but the list of benefits is just beginning.

2. Social sharing gets you more backlinks

Dofollow backlinks are the bricks that build the temple of your presence in the Web. Or a small shed, if you don’t have enough. Outbound links on social networks are usually nofollow links and don’t hold the same power. But Google favors sites that have both dofollow and nofollow links in their link profiles, as opposed to sites with few nofollow links. The latter are often suspected to be involved in machinations and may earn a penalty.

You can use WebCEO’s Backlink Checker to monitor and analyze the quality and quantity of backlinks to your site, contributing to a balanced and effective link-building strategy.

3. Social media buzz drives you more website traffic

This is a logical consequence of the above point. More links naturally mean more traffic. How much extra traffic you receive depends entirely on your pages’ popularity: the more subscribers, the more visitors and potential customers that will buy from you. It’s definitely worth investing your time in helping your pages grow!

4. Your website gets more exposure via sharing

The Internet is all about sharing content with others. It’s easier on social networks than anywhere else. If the content you post on your page is good and interesting, your visitors are likely to share it. Then ”their” visitors will learn you exist.

Word spreads and your brand gets recognized, increasing your chances against your competitors. Google will see your site’s traffic rise and they may be counting that as a ranking factor now. Which leads us to the next point…

5. Customers can find you there

Social networks have plenty in common with search engines like Google, they pretty much are search engines themselves because people conduct searches for specific keywords within them. Social networks are just better fit for socializing than regular search engines. That’s what makes them so popular. Because people spend several hours a day on social media, they are more likely to find your company’s page there than in Google. Make it easier for them to find you – by getting subscribed and shared or via PPC ads, including retargeting campaigns. Then it’s only a matter of whether you can convert your visitors into clients.

6. You can easily follow the latest trends

If you know what your customer wants, your marketing campaign is already on its way to a bright future. What better place to learn more about your audience’s interests than a platform where they openly discuss the latest trending topics? That’s how you can create and post content they’ll find enjoyable, both in social media and on your actual site. To create high-quality content that is optimized for both your customers and search engines, you can try WebCEO’s Content Assistant Tool, designed to help you strike the perfect balance between engaging and search-friendly content.

7. Google ranks social network profiles too

When you optimize your site and it shows up in top positions in SERPs, that’s great. When you don’t and your brand still shows up in top positions, that’s even better. A social media page that’s well-optimized for specific keywords is as likely to appear in SERPs as any other web page out there.

8. It’s easy to receive feedback from your audience

Social networks are all about being, well, social. You can ask your customers to leave reviews and testimonials on your site, but it’s so much easier to ask your audience for feedback in comments on your social media page. Ask, and you shall receive; sometimes you shall receive without even asking if your followers are impressed by you. Be sure to impress them in a good way.

8 Tips to Use Social Media Effectively

1. Be where your audience is

Choosing the wrong place to advertise yourself is like fishing in an empty pond: you’ll waste your time and starve. Research a social network’s demographics before making your decision to post there. For example, the majority of Instagram users are female. Are you selling a female-oriented product? Then you should consider Instagram as your main battleground.

2. Post regularly

The more content you produce, the more awe-inducing and engaging it is, the happier your followers will be. Especially if you do it often. It’s best not to keep them waiting too long: excitement tends to die down quickly, and then your audience forgets why it loved you at all. Besides, don’t you want them to know what you’re up to? Some of your visitors are your prospecting customers, they just don’t know it yet.

Keep them entertained and ready to become your clients. Strike the iron while it’s hot!

3. Emphasize on the visual

An old and verified truth: visual information is powerful. It leaves a much deeper impression on a viewer than raw text and is processed easier. Since your job is to promote your brand, you have to employ visual media – images and videos – and use them to impress.

A picture is worth a thousand words; a video is worth that and a thousand more. Consider putting your effort into making cool, unique, shareable visual content. It will make you so much more distinguished and memorable.

4. Make your text posts short

In social media, less is more. Twitter in particular is notorious for its limit of 140 characters per post. Information, when distributed in small portions, is easier to swallow and digest than a wall of text made of overly long paragraphs. Make your text posts just long enough to motivate the user to visit your site and do something there.

5. Write and reply to your customers

If I had to name a difference between social media messages and emails, I’d say it’s the environment. Social networks feel friendlier and more relaxing, with a stronger sensation of chatting with a real person. Can you relate? Of course you can. When both sides feel comfortable, the task of winning the audience over feels much more enjoyable. As they say, do what you love, and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.

6. Tag other businesses and share their pictures

Actively linking to other sites on your own is one of several ways to gain backlinks. The same is true in social media.

Tags and linked mentions of other companies in your posts cannot go unnoticed; the beneficiaries are likely to return the favor in the future and mention you in their own content, giving your brand more exposure. On top of that, bringing up a popular competing brand’s name in some of your posts can help people make an association between your two companies as part of a defined niche. Google values webpages and posts that mention various websites as part of a category.

7. Recycle expired content

It’s difficult to publish the same text twice on your own site without risking trouble with duplicate content. Fortunately, your pages in social media are exempt from this thorny issue. You can recycle old posts with virtually zero risk, except for annoying your audience if you abuse this. Do it right, and you can breathe new life into a piece of content that made you profits in the past (for example, one tied to a seasonal event like Christmas).

8. Optimize your social media activity for Bing

How many of you saw this coming? Not many, I bet. However, Bing has a healthy relationship with social media – more so even than Google the search giant, and gets a special mention.

In 2010, Bing made a statement about social signals being a ranking factor. But unlike Google, Bing has never retracted it. Without an overturning statement, it makes sense to assume it’s still true and use it as a basis for your social media campaign.

As one of Google’s main competitors, Bing has been gaining momentum lately. Don’t be quick to disregard it; rather, include it in your plans. Should Bing get big while riding the social tide, Google might get worried and review their stance on social media signals. And then you’ll be glad you’ve built a strong online presence.

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The post 8 Reasons Why Social Media Activity Affects Your Rankings – With 8 Tips appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.