Content Marketing SEO Strategy – Part 3 Social Media

This is part of a 5 part series on our content marketing SEO strategy.
Part 1 – Keyword Research
Part 2 – Blogging
Part 3 – Social Media
Part 4 – Landing Pages
Part 5 – Content Optimization

In this series so far I’ve talked about the importance of keyword research to build out your content strategy. Of course those keywords play a huge role in your blogging success. In fact, those very keywords play a crucial role in this whole content marketing SEO strategy.

The next part of this series is all about social media and how it is an important ingredient in this equation. As you know, social media is my passion. It is the best way to grow your online influence and reach more of the right people. But from an SEO standpoint, social media also helps you rank better.

How Does Social Media Help You Rank Better?

There is correlation between being social, sharing links and your search engine rankings. The truth of the matter is that a business that is doing well online is doing many things online. That means they probably have a search engine strategy in place, they have a content marketing strategy in place and they are sharing online. It is clear that a business that does all these things really cares. You can’t say one thing helps more than the other. They all work together. They are doing a content marketing SEO strategy whether they know it or not.

Beyond being a part of the overall strategy, we’ve found that being social directly helps your SEO. To break this down we need to look at what really helps your search rankings. The most important factor is links to your website. The more external links you have, those are links from other websites pointing back to your website, the better results you will get. So yes, social links are external links. They do count and we call them social signals.

While social signals are great, the real power social media has is to get your content in front of the right people who will then take your content and link to it from their websites. For example, if I share this blog post, people will read it. If I continue to share it and others share it, it will get into the right hands and if it hits home with some of those people, they might even link to it or reference it in a blog post of their own. This is where social media really helps. It propels your content.

Remember that and think about how your social shares can a) bring you traffic on a real-time basis and b) can help you get more links back to your website over time by building relationships with bloggers and social media influencers.

Social Media’s Relationship With Search

1. Social Media Changed Search
There is no denying the fact that social media changed the way we search. In fact, it changed the way search engines rank content too. It’s evolving and as search engines continue to evaluate content, sharing will be a way to proof which content is valuable and which deserves to be ranked highly.

2. The Lines Between Social & Search Are Blurry
People are searching on social media networks. People are looking for content, looking for videos and looking for real-time information. To say that the only way we search is through sites like Google and Bing is limited. Social and search are becoming more and more connected.

3. Social Media Helps You Get Found
Just like search engines, social media helps you get found and be heard. You need both and can no longer rely on just one.
This is part of a 5 part series on our content marketing SEO strategy.
Part 1 – Keyword Research
Part 2 – Blogging
Part 3 – Social Media
Part 4 – Landing Pages
Part 5 – Content Optimization