Social SEO: How SEO and Paid Social Media Can Work Together

What is Social SEO?

In the world of digital marketing, we know how important it is to gain visibility and attract relevant traffic from multiple channels. From SEO to Paid Social to Paid Search, we optimize these channels to perform at the highest level. But what about channel synergy? What happens when we bring two channels together and leverage the gains from one, to optimize the other?

In this post, we look specifically at how we can extrapolate data from paid social media campaigns to get better insights on how to approach SEO and vice versa.

Doing this the correct way can help increase visibility, improve link building, ranking signals, increase search demand, and drive more traffic to the site. This is known as Social SEO.

Types of Social SEO Strategies

Create Paid Social Ads Based on SEO-Rich Content

SEO-rich content is great for your site and your business. If you have a blog that is ranking well and bringing a lot of traffic to your site, why not take that blog and drive more visibility to it through social campaigns?

By using the acquisition feature in Google Analytics to help you narrow down the top performing landing pages in organic search, you can create a campaign on social media that helps to drive even more traffic to that page and your site overall.

Pie Graph on Laptop Computer Screen

Use SEO Keyword Research to Inform Paid Social Ads

SEMRush and Google’s Keyword Planner are great tools to use to determine where you currently stand in keyword performance.

Before creating an ad targeting keywords that may be underperforming or have a low search volume, do some keyword research to get a better understanding of which areas can best benefit from a campaign. Looking at volume and top 100 rankings of certain keywords can help paint a clear picture of where you should focus your paid social campaign.

Leverage Social Comments for Content Ideation

Reading comments sections of paid (or even organic) social media posts can help your team of writers generate new and fresh content ideas that everyone is talking about and is relevant.

Take it a step further by creating polls on Facebook and Instagram surrounding a certain topic to see how people respond and gauge interest. Boosting those polls will also give a good indication of how much traction that topic is gaining.

To perform this type of audience research at scale, we recommend using a tool such as SparkToro (a Seer favorite!)

Increase Organic Visibility & Build Links

Social SEO is a great way to increase visibility on your site and improve link building by increasing inbound links through paid social campaigns and sharing.

Your followers on social media and those retargeted in paid social campaigns can sometimes be a more accurate and relevant audience than the ones that come through organic search. This means:

Increased likelihood of higher CTR
Increased engagement on the page
More sharing = More link building (with less effort to link build on your end)

Improve Ranking Signals & Get Indexed Faster

Since social media ads can retarget a more relevant audience that will engage and spend more time on your page, it will thereby improve ranking signals for Google. Google will see an increase in relevant traffic coming to the site via ad campaigns and social media shares and will in all likelihood index those pages quicker.

Optimize Social Media Profiles for Branded Searches

It’s very important to build a strong brand presence not just on your website, but on social media, including YouTube. These pages can easily rank in the top positions and interested users will search for your name or your brand in organic search to learn more about your brand. Doing this can also improve your rankings without as many backlinks to the site.

Source: Databox

Get Started

Implement a social media calendar that will remind you to create posts based on the new content that is published on your site.
Align your social media and SEO goals to help you get a better understanding of what content can use further optimization or for new content ideas. Use Google Analytics to streamline those goals.
Have joint meetings with the social and SEO teams to align on where the two teams can work together on social SEO strategies.

💡 To learn more about creating engaging social campaigns that break through to target audiences, watch our webinar: "Level Up Your Paid Social Strategy with Data-Driven Design".