SEO and social media have always been intertwined because they both focus on content and building an audience, but the data you get from SEO can actually help you take things one step further when it comes to your social strategy. Because sometimes a social audience is more targeted, it’s common to use data from social for SEO help, but not usually the other way around. However, if you plan accordingly SEO data can be a great resource when it comes to finding audience trends outside of social media; thus hopefully bringing even more people to your social accounts.
Top 3 Ways to Use SEO Data to Improve Your Social Strategy
We contributed to a MarketingLand article here a few months ago and reiterated that your SEO data should not be used in place of your social data; it should just be used as a supplement. Your social media metrics are still going to offer great insights into improving your social strategy, but the question you have to ask here centers around what SEO data can give you that your social media data cannot.
Consider three different data points and how you can use them accordingly below:
Align Your Social and SEO Data
Looking at both data sets side-by-side can help you discover trends with your audience as well as trends in your SEO and/or social campaigns. For example, your social media data will help you see your growth in friend and follows. If you notice a trend upwards at the exact same time that you ran a video campaign on your website that brought a lot of clicks, the two could be related. This gives you a good place to start testing to determine if video on your website affects your social media or vice versa. Of course you could see trends with other campaigns as well such as a contest you ran, a piece of content you published, an interview you highlighted, and much more.
Notice Traffic Spikes in SEO for Popular Content
Your SEO traffic data is crucial to social media. If you see a spike in CTR because you posted an article about something specific, post that same topic on your social media. You also may want to consider posting your exact same content that you posted on your website to your social networks for maximum exposure. It won’t always work the same way, but you have a good chance of really catching the attention of your followers. After all, you already have a leg up because you know your audience is interested.
Track SEO Keywords on Social Media
You likely spend a good amount of time researching keywords to target and optimize for when it comes to organic search (as well as paid search). While social media doesn’t usually require you to focus on keywords so much as content, commenting, and images, you can still “listen” for these keywords on social media. In other words, it’s important that on social media you’re looking for individuals and pages that are talking about your industry and things that you care about because your exact company name isn’t usually going to be mentioned. You can know what keywords to listen for by using your SEO keyword data.
You can use these keywords by creating an alert for them in a social media tool you might use or by simply searching for them every few days on any given network. On Twitter, for example, you can also search for a hashtag of your keywords. This will help you connect with the right people and be present in the right discussions that you would have otherwise never known were even happening.
In the end, it’s important to realize that SEO and social media can both help the other when it comes to strategy. As long as you’re paying attention to what’s working in both areas and you’re comparing that data, you can cross over and mimic whichever is more successful at any given moment. It’s a win-win; so don’t limit yourself by keeping your data linear.
Do you use your SEO data to help your social strategy? Is there any tactic or method that you would add to the list? Let us know your story and your thoughts in the comment section below.