An effective website provides important information, gives prospects confidence in your business, and promotes your brand. But if your website isn’t showing up in organic searches, you’re losing out on a huge opportunity!
Today, you can increase your search visibility with social media platforms and develop an enviable online presence.
What is Search Visibility?
Search visibility is the percentage of clicks a website gets from its organic rankings for one or more keywords. If your website has low search visibility, users won’t easily find it.
Search visibility is also a good measure of how well your website stands up to your competitor’s sites. The higher your website’s search visibility, the more likely it is to attract the audience you want.
Here’s how a strong social media presence helps a website’s search visibility.
Social Media and Website Visibility
Social media is a critical part of a company’s online strategy.
When used properly, it will:
- Promote your company’s brand
- Develop a conversation between you and your customers/prospects
- Build trust with your audience
- Generate web traffic
- Increase sales
When you have direct conversations with your social media audience, you can answer questions, resolve issues, and build trust. Your audience will appreciate the time you take to develop a dialogue with them; they will reward your company with their trust, business, and loyalty.
A well optimized social media platform will help boost your Search Engine Results Page (SERP) results and attract organic traffic (traffic resulting from searches—not paid ads) to your website.
While social media can’t directly benefit your SERP rankings, there are many ways it indirectly affects SEO.
Social Media Adds Versatility to Your Outreach
Social media is an ideal place to share content. Your brand message should always be consistent across all platforms, but your social media can emphasize different aspects of your business at different times.
It can be more dynamic than your website in highlighting select products or services at specific times.
Some social media platforms allow you to conduct surveys with your audience. This is an inexpensive way to find out what your customers are thinking and what prospects want. It’s then up to you to take this information and incorporate it into your marketing efforts.
You may even find that you’re reaching the wrong audience and need to make changes accordingly.
Read about ways to improve your social media conversion rate.
It’s a Great Place to Share Content
Do you regularly add blog posts to your website? You should! And then use social media to share your new content. You will be thrilled with the results.
Sharing your blog posts on your social media accounts helps with backlinks and increasing website traffic.
There’s No Substitute for Quality
Websites and social media platforms have one major thing in common: you must provide quality content.
As Bill Gates said back in 1996—and it holds true to this day–“Content is king.”
What’s included in content? Everything you put online—text, images and videos. But never underestimate or insult your audience—it all must be worth their valuable time.
Text must be informative, engaging, well-written, and speak to your customers’ interests or concerns. Images must be attractive and top-quality. Videos must be worth the viewing time.
There’s Opportunity for More Backlinks
The more people who view your content, the greater chance someone will put a link back to it on their website. These are called backlinks or inbound links. And backlinks play a large role in your SEO ranking.
Search engines value backlinks because they interpret these links as meaning other people find your content valuable. This signals the search engine that your site is indeed worthy of a higher ranking.
You may have the most informative and dynamic content, but if no one is paying attention to it, search engines won’t be that impressed either. But when there’s online excitement about your web content, search engines will take notice!
Value Those Shares!
Hopefully, social media readers will share your website content. And many other people will subsequently view and further share your content.
Shared content is important because it makes content more visible and can drive traffic to your website. It also leaves open the possibility of gaining backlinks on other websites.
Do social media signals help your SEO ranking?
The effect of social signals (shares, likes, etc.) on SEO ranking is still up for debate.
Many SEO experts believe social signals are generally ignored in ranking algorithms, while others believe it contributes to a better ranking.
What there is agreement about is that having a strong social media presence will contribute to greater visibility of your content and may ultimately lead to more website traffic and increased backlinks from other websites.
Develop Trust with Social Media
Today prospects don’t just want to see a website—they expect a legitimate business to have a social media presence where they can get to know you and your brand better. If they can’t find you on social media, they’ll wonder how much you actually care about your customers.
Don’t lose out on this opportunity to build trust with your audience. Show them exactly what sets you apart from the competition and strive to earn their trust every day.
Get Prospects to Your Website Quickly!
It takes time to build up your SEO search results. SEO analyzes many factors, including how long the search engine has indexed your site or specific content. Experts say it can take the search engine anywhere from 3 to 12 months before it puts your website in its rightful place in the SERPs.
Happily, social media engagement is more immediate and can drive people to your website much earlier than the search engines will. This is especially important for new businesses or businesses that need to attract new customers quickly.
Some Tips for Effective Social Media Involvement
Be meticulous when setting up a social media profile. Know how to manage your social media platforms.
- Choose a relevant, easy-to-remember profile name
- Keep branding across all social media platforms and websites consistent
- Build relationship with your audience—learn concerns and needs, offer solutions
- Link to your website and other relevant social media
- Provide content your audience craves
- Optimize content for search engines
- Include sharing buttons and calls to action
- Consider paid ads to attract a larger audience
- Include contact information
Contact Evans Alliance for integrated marketing to build your brand and manage your online presence.
