Social SEO: Optimizing social media for search engines
Ranking high on top of all Google results - that's the goal of search engine optimization, short: SEO. It's also being dicussed how social media can contribute to improve the findability of a website.
Google remains number 1
SEO is a sub-area of search engine marketing (SEM), which also includes placing adverts on search engines (search engine advertising, SEA for short). 96 per cent of all search queries on mobile devices and 84 per cent of all desktop search queries are made on Google. The number of search queries on other platforms is negligible. The average internet user has 5 social media accounts.
It's no surprise, that..
- Social media platforms are also increasingly being used as search engines to find information on specific topics and
- online marketing experts are evaluating how social media can be used to catapult a landing page to a higher position in Google searches
6 tips for Social SEO
Studies in recent years have shown that social signals (= interactions on social media such as likes, comments and shares) only have an indirect effect on Google rankings. Furthermore, Google does not regard social media platforms as independent websites. However, with a few tricks, social media can also have an impact on search engine rankings:
- Content must be shareable. When creating content, make sure it adds value and encourages sharing.
- Google recognises website content as relevant if it is often linked to.
- It is advisable to share content such as blog posts on your own social media channels to ensure more clicks.
- Video content not only increases reach on platforms such as Instagram, but is also a method of appearing in two Google tabs at once: In the "All" tab and the "Video" tab.
- Search engines attach great importance to so-called backlinks on websites. In other words: The more relevant content is linked in an article / blog post, the more relevant the website is considered by Google and the higher the website ranks.
- Captions not only serve the purpose of accessibility, but also ensure that the images can be found via Google Image Search, edit the bio and add relevant keywords (=search terms).
- Hashtags also increase findability on the platform and the channel is more likely to be displayed on the "Explore" page.
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