Social SEO: Five Ways to Harness Social Media to Fire Up Your SEO

The effective use of social media has become a strategic imperative to building a distinctive and relevant brand with which your customers, partners and advocates can engage. And a well conceived and executed social media strategy offers intriguing opportunities for your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. By actively incorporating SEO into your social media strategy, you can magnify the benefits of your social media marketing efforts and further raise the visibility of your brand.

Search engine optimization focuses on improving traffic volume and quality to a website through organic (unpaid or natural) search results. Historically, much of a company’s off-site SEO efforts were focused on trying to build quality, authoritative inbound links. The more trusted links to a website, the more important the site and the higher the site’s rankings, resulting in increased traffic to that site.

While inbound links continue to be important, search engines are increasingly using social content to build inferences about what consumers are looking for. Google, Bing and other search engines have a mandate to incorporate social content on their quest for ever-more relevant search results, opening up an entirely new spectrum for marketers to fold into their SEO strategies.

Here are the top five aspects to consider when developing your company’s social SEO strategy.

5. Local Search: Many local sites have sections for business owners to describe their businesses (think Yelp or Citysearch). If your business is listed, make sure the information is correct. Search engines consider such things as map locations, proper spelling and reviews.

4. Real-Time Search: Search engines are turning to Twitter, Google Buzz and Facebook to help determine what consumers are talking about. Conversations, search spikes and retweets indicate popular topics and can give those topics an SEO advantage.

3. Universal Search: Videos, news, images and product searches are now actively incorporated into search results pages. Optimizing multimedia can give your business a more dominant presence on those pages.

2. Personalized Search: One of the hottest developments of search today is the heightened attention search engines pay to new, “personalized” signals to maximize relevancy. Your personal search history, location and how recently and actively you communicate within your social circle are all beginning to factor into your personal search results.

1. BYOB (Build Your Own Brand): Differentiating your product — and connecting and engaging with your customers to create meaningful, long-lasting relationships — remains the foundation to success. Building a compelling brand drives everything you do and provides a way for consumers to connect, enabling your brand to be woven into the ever-expanding social mediascape.

For more information on how nFusion can help you use social SEO as part of a winning social marketing strategy, please contact Rachel Sheriff (512) 716-7420.