It might come as a surprise to learn that SEO best practices are not exclusive to your website content. You want people to be able to find your content easily regardless of where it lives on the internet.
The simple act of growing your audience is going to tip the SEO scales in your favor, but that really is a back-end effect. Before you can grow your follower base, people need to be able to find you. So how, starting from scratch, do you ensure they can? I have five proven methods to share with you today that will help you grow your social networks organically.
A Quick Word on Paid Traffic
It’s gotten rather easy to buy web traffic over the past few years, and I won’t downplay the effectiveness of it. The only caution I will give here is that if you intend to go the paid traffic route, don’t bother trying it until you have the other pieces of the puzzle together first. Please also make sure that you have enough high-quality content at the ready when you start paying to be seen, otherwise you’re just throwing good money after bad.
So, five ways to boost your engagement via SEO, then…
#1 – Attract a Variety of External Links
The easiest and best way to do this is twofold: Begin by having some great, top-quality content at the ready (sound familiar?). Then, post your content with a call to action to like and share. As your content gets shared around, you will generate links from other social networks as well as other outside websites.
The more links you generate from unique sources, the more attention Google will give your content and the better it will rank. If the content is superior to that of your competition, you will be able to edge them out in searches, making it easier for potential new followers (and customers) to find you, all without spending a penny on ads.
You may also want to research some relevant hashtags to tag onto your posts. They serve as a highly effective shortcut to very targeted segments of your audience.
#2 – Optimize Posts for Maximum Engagement
Get good at this and you will get some great rankings for your most popular posts. Google tends to favor posts with high levels of engagement, which helps you find new followers searching for keywords in your posts.
Your job here, then, is twofold: Research relevant keywords that are popular right now (these rankings will be short term so the keywords need to be super-relevant at the time of your posting), and provide a level of quality to your content – from your web content writing to visuals to every piece of multimedia – that makes people not currently following you want to stop and have a look around on your page.
This method works particularly well with Facebook since that platform does not restrict the length of a post like Twitter or some other platforms do. Treat the first 150 characters of your posting as your meta description. Seed with a top-ranking keyword and either a powerful description of the content or a call to action to click through to offsite content.
#3 – Encourage Engagement of All Kinds
The easiest and most effective way to accomplish this is simply to be direct. Appeal to your audience to share your content through a concise call to action. If you find that just asking isn’t working as well as you would like, incentivize the action by offering something in return: a discount code, a cheap digital freebie… anything that might motivate people to do you this one small favor: “Share this post to be entered in our Armor Box Smartphone Case contest…”
Keep in mind that any interaction on your content will boost your numbers and put you in front of more people. Likes, shares, retweets, saves, shares, and replies all work in your favor, so be sure to encourage all of it. Post lots of cool content for people to like. Start conversations for people to join. Keep engagement high, and it will inevitably lead to more.
#4 – Zero in on Local SEO
The same rules apply with this on social media as on any other kind of platform. Seed your content with long-tail keywords and you will accomplish two things in one action. First, you will rank higher than your competition on local searches via sites like Google and Bing. Second, you will increase your visibility from within the specific network where that content lives, making it easier for your local audience to find you.
#5 – Send a Consistent Brand Message
It’s true of SEO, and it’s true of growing your audience organically via a specific social platform: Integrity and sincerity are cornerstones of success when it comes to making your brand more visible. For this reason, it is of utmost importance that all your content deliver the same clear, trustworthy message.
Keep the quality of your content high and engage regularly with your audience. The more you do those things, the more respect and excitement you will build for your brand. That will lead to more engagement overall, which will help you find more followers within the community as well as through traditional web searches.
Final Takeaway
Optimizing your content for social media engagement will help fortify your marketing efforts from two strategic directions: from within the current social network and from the wider, global internet community. Put these five strategies into practice starting today, and the numbers should start speaking for themselves in a relatively short amount of time.