The Connection Between Search Engine Marketing and Social Media: How They Go Hand-in-Hand to Enhance Results

It may not be surprising that search engine marketing is the greatest way to drive traffic to your website. In fact, take a look at your website analytics right now and I can almost guarantee that search engines are among the top five producers of website traffic. Now consider this: social media—overall content, interactions, and links about your brand—plays a significant part in the search engines’ algorithms to determine search ranking results. So, even if you have questioned using social media as part of your attraction marketing strategy before, I urge to you to look more closely at the impact you could make to your brand by getting involved in social to help your search engine results.

Obviously, the goal of search engine marketing is to help make your brand show up in top rankings within the search engines when people conduct queries. There are a few key actions that you can take to help make this happen. This includes:

1. Making sure the backend code of your website is properly optimized
2. Enhancing your website with current, relevant content—this is a significant factor in rankings
3. Refreshing and updating your website content frequently
4. Including more links from outside, reputable sources that link back to your website
5. How often your website is shared in social media
6. How often people visit your website from social media

It is a fact that social media plays a role in your search engine rankings. In fact, with each new update that Google makes to its algorithm, social’s impact gets even more substantial. Therefore, I encourage everyone—regardless of business size, industry scope or product/service offering—to have a social media presence online. Here are some tips on how to best use social media to help with your search engine rankings.

Thought Leadership: Develop original content and share within your social mediums. As you create relevant new content and post it for your social audiences to share, you will build your reputation as a thought leader and naturally grow your following.

Engage: Involvement creates engagement; therefore, it is essential that you actively engage with your audience—i.e. comment, share and like others postings.

Drive Interaction: The more your content is shared (liked, favorited, followed, +1, re-tweeted, and/or bookmarked) the higher its value and usefulness. Because this is a key component to search engines’ algorithms, this can also lead to a higher probability of increased rankings in search results.

Augment Content: Review content from other sources within your industry and add further value to it. Repost articles with a summary of your thoughts or perspective of the content when sharing. Remember—you must always give credit to the original author on their content when re-posting on your sites.

Develop a Quality Network: Interact with those in your industry that are considered leaders online. In this case, quality potentially matters more than quantity. Seek out experts in your field, read what they have to say, engage them in, and then debate and share your own ideas.