Tag Archives: building your seo strategy

SEO strategy and social media

Using social media to help promote your small business is a given. It is something that businesses automatically know they need to do to be visible online.

What’s the difference between SEO strategy and social media?

SEO (search engine optimization) is a factor in helping your social media strategy, but there is a difference between social media management and SEO. Social media management is about posting, promoting, and optimizing content on your social media channels, whereas SEO strategy is about ensuring that your social media content or website content is more searchable, so when people search particular words or phrases, your business is found.

But they have one thing in common – both require content to attract an audience. Just like email, SEO strategy and Social Media Management are all tools to reach your target audience.

It used to be that that these two things were miles apart, but in 2024 this line is becoming more blurred. With an estimated 4.6 billion people using social media in 2023, (Source – Forbes – https://www.forbes.com/advisor/in/business/social-media-statistics/ ) social media is crucial for businesses and has changed the face of information sharing, communication and audience interaction. Social media is now influencing SEO and is absolutely necessary for a website’s visibility.   

How does SEO and social media link up in 2024?

In 2024 and beyond, it’s going to be all about social media. You’ll have seen businesses that diligently post about their products and services, then they randomly post a funny cat video, and it goes viral and really pushes that brand’s visibility!

I’m not saying you should post funny cat videos (even if I do like them!), but with AI being pushed in our faces and used constantly by some businesses, SEO is not just about catching the attention of your audience or the general public, it’s about impressing those pesky bots too!

HOW DO YOU DO THAT? 

Social media is becoming more acceptable to SEO guidelines as, in 2024, it’s becoming a force that helps influence your website’s search ranking.

If your social media profile is SEO optimized, this helps make your website more visible on search engines. And Facebook and other social media channels ads can also help drive traffic to your website, which helps with visibility, click-through rates, how long people spend on your website etc.

Social Media Shares

This is another example of how the search engines decide on the relevance and quality of your social media content. If your posts get shared, you’re getting more visibility on other peoples’ pages, and this shows search engines that your posts are valuable, engaging, and interesting. Although Google says that it doesn’t consider social shares etc as a direct ranking factor, but a study done by Semrush.com showed that pages with more shares DO rank higher! So, there is a link.

And it’s not just shares – likes and comments on your social media posts are also signals to search engines that a particular business has quality, valuable information to share. The search engine, Bing, are using social media signals increasingly to help them decide the relevance and popularity of a website.

Your Social Media Profile

This is where you can really improve your visibility for search engines. You need to ensure that your social media profile is SEO optimized with relevant keywords in descriptions and bios, as well as ensuring you have a link to your website, blog, or online shop.

How can you optimize your social media for SEO?

  • First, do you have several social media sites…Facebook, X (formally Twitter), Instagram, Pinterest? Make sure that you have a consistent profile image, so you are more recognisable. Complete all the profile or bio section, making sure it is totally relevant to your business, whilst being attractive enough to appeal to your audience. Include a link to your website and, if you have a newsletter sign up page/opt-in or a particular product campaign on the go, you can do a link to that too. If you use a tool called https://linktr.ee/    you can put all your relevant links in the same area. This is a FREE tool, BUT, (there is a but), if you use your linktree link on your social media pages, you will be directing your traffic to that link and not directly to your website, which obviously effects your SEO. And users have to click to linktree, then click to your website, which takes longer. Some people do find this very useful, but I’ve decided to bin it for now and just link directly to my website – and I’ll be monitoring to see if there are any improvements in my website traffic. Watch this space!
  • You hear this all the time, but it is so important…be consistent with your posts and post regular updates. This will be different depending on what social media site you use, for example on X you need to post several times a day, but you don’t necessarily need to do this with Facebook or LinkedIn. So, post according to guidelines for each different site.
  • Create great posts. Use eye-catching images/photos that attract attention, craft a good catchy headline, and actually ASK for a share. This is good optimization, and it has been proven that these techniques work.
  • The question I’ve been asked a lot lately is around the use of hashtags. Can they help with SEO? Hashtags are keywords, so yes, they can help to categorise your content and help social media users find it. But hashtag use can be different on every social media site,
  • Take a good look at your website and ensure that your website content is optimized for social sharing. Here are a few tips to encourage visitors to share your content.
    – Create quality content with a great headline
    – Optimize content keywords
    – Include eye-catching images/photos
    – Make sure you have a call to action
    – Add social media sharing buttons to all your content – if you make it easy for people to share your content, they are more likely to do it.
    – Videos are still huge and get noticed more easily by search bots, so introduce the odd video into your content.
  • Don’t forget about all the above – it’s not enough to do it all and then walk away and leave your sites to their own devices. You need to constantly be there to engage with people who comment on your content – answer any queries, comment on their comments, and respond to any reviews you get. You can also connect with influencers related to your content – like and share their content, make comments on their pages. If you belong to groups relating to your niche, take part in conversations, give advice, answer questions – interact with people. Your responses and interaction help social media algorithms recognise that your content is active, which in turn, improves its reach. And KEEP POSTING – social media moves very quickly and it’s easy for posts to get lost among all the others.

The content you share on social media.

Your content needs to captivate your audience – it’s no longer enough to just constantly sell, sell, sell. Your followers will soon recognise that this is all you do and will either find it boring or will think that you are just interested in selling – not interested in them as a person. People like the personalised approach and that is why some social media pages are more popular than others. They engage, entertain, inspire, and educate their audience. The age old 80/20 rule that I often bang on about is relevant here. 80% of your posts should be in these areas and only 20% of your content in selling your products or services’.

Some of the most captivating posts now seem to be blog posts, videos, infographics, and podcasts, so if you try and include some of those in your social media posts, it will help with your visibility and popularity. When you post this kind of thing, ensure that you share the links to, for example, your website for blog posts, link to where your podcast or videos are, such as YouTube. These links help improve your traffic and increase your visibility. These are great social signals that let Google know that your social media site’s content is top quality, and therefore can enhance your search rankings.   

Like everything else when running your small business, social media is a crucial part of getting your messages, services, and products out to the masses. It takes time and effort to make it successful but stick with it and it will work.

Now, please share this article if you have found it useful (!) and look at my other blog posts to find more articles to help you market your small business. As always, if you have any questions or need help, just drop me an email or a message on my Facebook page (LINK) and we can arrange a free 30-minute consultation.  

Building your SEO strategy – Part 2 – Creating Content

Creating your SEO content

Following on from my last blog post, Part 1 – Preparing your content, you’ll know about keywords and how to research them and how to research your competitors and the keywords they use.

Now it’s time to put this into practice. By content, I mean anything from website pages to blog posts and even social media posts. In fact, anything that can be found online that someone out there could be searching for. And you’ll be using some of those keywords that you have researched.

  • You can either create something along the same lines as your competitor that is better than they’ve created.
  • Or you can create something completely different.

I prefer the latter and create something completely different – mainly because I know this will make me stand out more, and because I know my audience and know they like the kind of content I writer – in that I try to keep it as straightforward and easy to understand as I can. I write SPECIFICALLY for you – my readers!

How do I know what to write? Because you tell me! I take notice of comments and posts that you put on social media or listen to what you tell me when I speak to you face to face or via messenger. I try and notice the marketing things you’re struggling with, and I ask questions to find out, and often give options, so I know that what I write about will be interesting or helpful to you.

So, let’s make a start with yours…

What is SEO friendly content?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) friendly content is created so that it helps the search engines, such as Google, rank it higher. This doesn’t mean stuffing it to the brim with keywords, it just needs to help search engines find, understand, and connect your content to the right users for the content you’ve written. 

Although keywords are important, you’ve guessed it, there’s much more to it than that! If your content is optimized well, it helps with the user experience and encourages the user to stay on your website or blog for longer, so giving you higher browsing times and engagement rates – and so helping you rank higher on search engines!

How to make your content SEO friendly

Let’s look at some of these in turn…

Create valuable content

This is not necessarily creating what you want to, but creating content that speaks to your reader, content that is valuable to them and caters to their specific needs or questions they’ve asked you.

You may have seen the odd post from me and from others you follow, where a post will simply say – ‘Ask me anything.’ If you post something like this, you will get many random questions, such as ‘what’s your favourite colour?,’ or ‘what music is on your playlist?’

But, you will also get valuable questions about your business, which will give you ideas for social media posts and blog posts – and new ideas for your business, which you will then need to add to your website.

I digress – Google’s algorithms favour this high quality, valuable content, so the more value you provide, the longer people will stay on your website or content.

Example

For example, say you are interested in baking and want to share a recipe for spaghetti bolognaise. The title you’ve chosen is ‘How to make tasty spaghetti bolognaise.’ Now, you will get some people who will click on this but try going for a slightly different angle ‘How to cook authentic Italian spaghetti bolognaise.’

This not only more appealing, but it also gives you options. You could write about the history of that dish, and you may know someone who is Italian who loves to cook, and who would be happy to be interviewed about their particular recipe and how it came to be in existence – it might be an old family recipe they’d be willing to share. This gives a story to your content, which is much more engaging.

Headlines and sub-headers

Headlines and sub-headers are great for SEO optimization. It not only enables your reader to skim your article or webpage, but the sub-headers also help them find what they’re looking for and makes it easier to read. And people tend to share things that are easy to read.

It also helps the search engine bots to recognise headlines and helps them understand more clearly what your content is about.

Having your keyword(s) in your heading or sub-heading also helps – just make sure you don’t stuff so many in that your headings or content becomes less easy to understand or messy.  

The Hook

Whilst I’m on the subject of headings and sub-headings, you also need to think about the ‘hook’ that will draw people into your article.  Using engaging words or numbers in headings has been proven to pull people into an article. So, if you had a title such as, ‘Facts about pasta,’ you could use ‘5 facts about pasta that you didn’t know’. This grabs the attention of the reader and they’re curious about those 5 facts they didn’t know! Just be sure to keep a keyword in there too.

Readability and the format of your content  

SEO is also about keeping the attention of your readers for as long as possible, so make sure the format of your content is easy on the eye. Use images, short paragraphs, bullet-points, and sub-headings so their eyes are drawn to different things. Or, if you’re writing something instructional, set it out in steps to make it easier to follow.

If you use images, optimize them by adding alt text or describe the image. This help with SEO, but also helps people who are sight impaired to understand what your images are. Use a keyword if you can, but it needs to make sense!

Add CTA Buttons

It’s always good to add a CTA (call to action) button too, so your readers know what to do next. This could be in the form of ‘Buy now,’ ‘Learn more,’ or ‘Pop over to my website.’ This makes it easier for readers to take the next step.

Add links

There are different kinds of links you can add to your content – more so for blog posts or webpages.

Backlinks – these are links that send your reader to another article or page on your website that is relevant to the content they’re reading.

External links – these are links to other peoples’ website or content, which is really helpful to ranking your content higher, especially if the links are to high-quality, reputable sites.  

If you quote stats, state where readers can find the source for those stats – usually a link to the relevant research website.

All links give your content credibility with SEO and the better your links, the higher your page will rank in search results.  

Length of your content

Advice about the ‘right’ length of content is something that changes frequently. It used to be that articles of 300 words or less were best, and that the more posts you publish, the more traffic you’d get.

These days, search engines give a higher priority to article that are longer with more quality. So, the latest advice is articles of 1,500+ words and published less often. Apparently, the reason for this is that Google tries to give priority to posts that provide more thorough answers to the questions and searches they get from their users.

You can find out which of your articles get most engagement from your analytics – which are visited the most and which are read for the longest period of time. And you can also see which generate the highest conversions – for example sign ups to your newsletter. This is how you find out what works best for you.

AND finally…

  • Make sure your website is mobile friendly and that the format looks good across all devices.
  • Ensure that your pages load quickly – when people click on your website or blog content, they won’t hang around waiting for it all to load, it needs to be there asap. A good web hosting provider will sort this out.

I hope you’ve found this article useful and not too involved – I’ve tried to keep it as easy to understand as I can.

Good luck with making sure everything you write on your blog or website is SEO friendly and if you need any help, feel free to contact me.

You can also sign up to my newsletter, where you will receive more great marketing tips and get 102 ideas for social media posts.

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Building your SEO strategy – Part 1

Preparing for your SEO strategy  

Whether you have a small business or are part of a bigger corporate, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a must for your website to help you rank higher on Google and other search engines.

Building your SEO strategy sounds complicated and may make you want to immediately zone out and not read more – but trust me, I’m going to try and keep it simple! It’s really just a plan!

Your SEO strategy is simply the process of organising your website’s content to improve your chances of appearing in search results – a way of maximising your opportunities to get organic traffic from search engine results pages, (SERPs).

Having a strategy or plan, helps you keep on track when you create your content. It helps you see that you need to create content that people are looking for and searching for, rather than creating content you think they’re looking for, or posting what you want to post.

When you just react and post without a plan, your content will appear unorganised and scattered – this is when search engine bots have a problem indexing your site, understanding exactly what you do and therefore, have a problem ranking your pages.

BUT WE CAN FIX THIS! However, as it’s such a big subject, I’m going to do this over a few blog posts, so you don’t feel too overwhelmed!

Steps to helping create an SEO strategy.

Here are few simple steps to follow:

Make a list of keywords.

This is always the first step to take. Use Google search to help you with this. OK, let’s go with an example…

You make candles – you sell them at markets and on your website – and you also use social media. You make all sorts of candles for all sorts of occasions, some standard that people can buy and some bespoke.

Your keyword search starts with Google – type in candles or put the word twice (as I did – candles candles).

Google will then suggest loads of options, such as:

  • Beeswax candles.
  • Votive candles
  • Scented candles
  • Four candles (!!! This made me smile – if you know the Two Ronnies sketch)
  • Birthday candles
  • Cake candles
  • Soy candles
  • Specialist candles
  • Candles near me

You’ll know that these are good keywords to use for SEO as they come straight from Google and so you know this is what people are already searching for.

You will find that short-tail keywords (search words using just one word – such as ‘candle’) are more popular as most people will start with just one word when looking for something specific.

Long-tail keywords (such as ‘candles for special occasions), won’t be as popular in the volume of people looking for them, but they tend to be generally easier to rank for and obviously attract people who are searching for something more specific. 

I’d say type in several different words and short phrases into Google and see what comes up – try and have a list of at least 10 keywords.

You can then check them in a keyword checker (there are some free sites out there, such as  https://www.wordstream.com/keywords or Ubersuggest) which will give you the number of people searching that keyword and whether they’re low, medium or high volume.  

Look at Google’s first page.

Once you’ve got your list of keywords, type them one at a time into Google search and look at the first 10 entries that come up.  This shows you the businesses that currently rank for that keyword, and the kind of thing (maybe a list or a business itself) that people are looking for when using that keyword. Make a note of what comes up in the search and what kind of things, such as lists or blog posts that come up.

Analyse your competitors. 

Most of us will know who our main competitors are, but to find out who Google thinks your competitors are, you can use a free tool, such as Semrush, to help you. You simply type the URL of your website into their search, then click on ‘Domain overview’ and scroll down where you’ll find a further search called ‘Main organic competitors.’ If you click on this and then click on ‘view all,’ you will get loads of information about keywords. It will show a list of all your competitors, plus the most common keywords that you share, as well as telling you how much traffic those keywords pull in.

Where you see a lot of common keywords, you’ll have your list of at least 4-5 competitors.

Keyword gap

You can now use the Semrush ‘Keyword Gap Tool.’

The ‘gap’ refers to the keywords that your competitors are ranking for, but that you’re NOT ranking for.

This tool will help you identify those gaps, so you can then use them on your website or blog, therefore optimising your existing content with those keywords – or creating new pages to use them.

To use this tool, you simply put the URL of your website and then the URLs of four of your competitors and press ‘compare’ and scroll down to ‘all keywords details for…’ and click on the ‘missing’ tab. You’ll get a huge list and then it’s up to you to sort through which of those missing keywords would be relevant to your business and to your website. 

There are lots of other uses that Semrush can help you with in analysing your competitors and your website, so it’s worth going on and having a play – and it’s really interesting!

These are the first few steps for SEO and will help get you prepared to look at your SEO strategy. Next time we’ll look at how to use this new-found knowledge to help you rank on Google.

If this all feels a bit too overwhelming, I can help you with your SEO strategy through 1:1 coaching. Just contact me to find out more.