3 Ways to use social media to improve your SEO

While social media a great way to drive traffic to your site, it can also be used to help grow and improve your overall SEO efforts. Customers are happy to give you their opinions on your company and social media gives them the outlet to do so. Using their insight and experience with your brand can help you craft better SEO - giving you higher rankings and your customers the content they want.

1) Use social media as a keyword research tool

You’ll need to do a little digging, but social media can be a great keyword research tool. Sure, it won’t tell you how many visits / impressions each keyword gets, but it will give you an idea of how to start building out your keyword list. See what type of content (not just your own, but competitors’ as well) gets the most engagement on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and more and look to see if you see patterns of keywords and key phrases.

2) Get inspiration for content marketing

Social media is a great way to conduct your own primary research (think of it as a virtual focus group). LinkedIn Groups are a great place to ask not only your customers, but others in your industry, questions that can lead to inspiration for content marketing, like blog posts and white papers. One great thing about LinkedIn Groups is that questions usually turn into group conversations, rather than a simple back and forth, so don’t be afraid to jump into the conversation and keep it going. Nothing is worse than someone posting a question, getting multiple answers, and then never addressing those who’ve participated. People like to be acknowledged, be sure to do that, especially when you’re using them to help with your business.

3) Speak to your customers in their own voice

This does not mean that you need to start using ‘u’ for ‘you’, but it does mean that you can gauge what at what level your customers are comfortable speaking about your brand and industry. Notice if they use the same jargon as you or if they avoid jargon all together. This will help dictate how you can create content that your customers can relate to and understand. This can also be helpful with dictating the type of content you create. Do your customers prefer blog posts? Image-based content? Are they sharing / commenting on videos rather than articles? These are also things to take into consideration when ‘speaking’ like your customer.

Social media is really a great way to get to know the ins and outs of your customers. And once you start to learn what they like and what they’re interested in, you can then use this knowledge to create content for your brand that will be consumed and shared, thus increasing your SEO and overall rankings.