Do you know why Facebook and Twitter are better than SEO when it comes to getting more traffic for your business website?
They’re not!
Okay, I admit it was a bit of a trick question, but bear with me. The truth is that neither SEO nor social will get you targeted traffic that converts if you don’t focus on your audience.
When both are used correctly, however, I can guarantee you will find your customers and move them into your sales funnel.
Don’t believe me?
Why SEO is Not Enough
Let’s say you have an online storefront selling vitamins and supplements. When you look at your analytics, you see you have a significant uptick in traffic, but little to none of that traffic is converting.
Great car, but not the SEO you were looking for!
That’s when you look at your keywords and discover people are finding your site when they search for “Porsche Boxster.”
Huh?
You blogged once about that car, but it continues to be the most popular post on your site! And yes, you’re getting lots of traffic, but it has nothing to do with what you’re selling.
So: great SEO, but it’s worthless because it’s not targeted.
How Social Will Improve Your SEO
SEO depends on keywords, but let’s simplify that. SEO happens because of words.
Which words are your customers using? What language do they speak when they talk about your product? Those words become the basis of your copy.
Social media can help you discover their language. The best social media strategy is to find one person at a time and listen to them. Search through Twitter and Facebook to find the users linked to your target audience.
Pull out the hashtags they use, words from their Twitter bios. Identify the Facebook groups and pages they’re members and fans of. What topics and questions are they posting and responding to?
From there, create a word cloud using http://www.wordle.net/ or http://tagcrowd.com/. The biggest words become the categories and focus of your business blog.
Please note, this is not a one-time activity. To stay relevant you must track your audiences on a regular basis. Set up Google Alerts to be delivered once daily. If you are an IFTTT user, you can use this recipe that pulls results into a Google spreadsheet for easier tracking. This IFTTT recipe will also pull tweets with a certain hashtag into a Google spreadsheet. (Can you tell I’m a big fan of spreadsheets?)
Next, Use Social to Cultivate Customer Relationships
You want to use social to cultivate relationships before you ever send them to your blog (and never tweet at someone to buy from you!).
Twitter makes this very easy by allowing you to create a list of relevant people. If you’re a small business, try targeting 25 people of your key audience as a pilot study.
Google Plus has both social and SEO benefits. For a complete list check out this article from Social Media Today about why your business should be on G+. Most importantly: when you share a blog post on G+, Google immediately indexes the post, meaning it shows up in search results instantly. In 2014 Google owns 67.6% of the online search market (for comparison, Bing only gets 18.7% of the same market).
With 67.6% of your customers using Google, it makes sense that you’d want your blog content to be searchable as fast as possible.
SEO + Social = More Customers
In summary:
- Create all of your content specifically for your customers and no one else.
- Use social media and social search to find your customers and identify their needs and wants, that only you can solve.
- Build relationships with your customers before you drive them to your site.
- Invest more of your time and money into your website and creating content than using social. Remember – you don’t convert on social, you convert on your website.
- Use social to drive traffic to your site. Remember, G+ will both build your SEO and your social presence.
This is one woman’s view. Which do you value more, Facebook and other social media? Or SEO?
“Boxster sunset HDR 2” by Robert S. Donovan is licensed under CC BY 2.0
“Words in the Sky” by Micha Klim is licensed under CC BY 2.0
