Search engine optimization is a very difficult thing to master, especially for new business owners. Every day, there are thousands of brands publishing hundreds of thousands of kinds of content that it is difficult to stand out from the crowd. Improving your ranking is very important to reaching a wider audience.

Luckily, you can easily use social media to improve your content strategy. Popular apps like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram are home to millions of users that can potentially be your future customers. In a way, social media is key to boosting your visibility and ranking highly on search engines.

Today, we will be going over the role of social media in Los Angeles SEO and understanding how to utilize it for the best results.

Is Social Media Useful for SEO?

While social media does not directly lead to better search engine optimization, it does help give your content exposure. It does this in several ways—social media allows you to distribute your content to a wider audience, increases your website’s traffic and visibility promotes your brand’s reputation, and increases the lifespan of your content. Search engines will then recognize your content as something worth reading and will likely tag your blog or website as a recommended search result.

According to extensive research by Cognitive SEO, the higher the activity regarding your content (e.g., likes, comments, and shares on Facebook, LinkedIn, and the like), the higher your search engine result ranking may be. Let’s take a look at the following image:

As you can see, the graph is fairly linear and tells you all you need to know about the usefulness of social media in SEO. Again, while social media may not directly lead to better SEO (i.e., more social media posts about your content does not equate to higher rankings), a good, well-thought-out article that is trending among a wide audience is enough to drastically boost your SEO.

How Do I Use Social Media to Its Fullest Advantage?

Now that you’ve understood the advantages of social media in search engine optimization, it’s time to use it to its fullest extent. Here are several factors you should consider when creating new content for your brand.

USEFULNESS

It helps if your content is something of value to your readers. As a business owner, you’re not only selling products and services—you are also selling an idea. You need to engage with your customers, show them that you understand everything about your brand, and are there to help them.

If your website primarily sells healing crystals and gemstones, for example, you can create articles on the benefits of rose quartz, the best crystals for productivity, or the use of crystals in fortune-telling. If your brand is primarily targeted towards families, you could write about tips and tricks for first-time parents, what to do when your child is teething, and other useful information they might be interested in.

Once you post useful information on your social media, it can encourage people to check out your website, widen your audience reach, and promote a great reputation by word-of-mouth.

QUALITY

As a professional Los Angeles SEO company, as we’ve already mentioned, we cannot stress enough how having many social media posts does not automatically lead to better search rankings. In fact, it may even be detrimental to your brand! Having multiple articles with zero traffic can send search engines the message that your website does not have a lot of valuable content to offer. Additionally, churning out social media post after social media post without much thought can look spammy and turn off your audience into reading your content.

Instead, just focus on the quality of your work. Only put out content that you’ve put effort into so your audience (and in turn, Google) can see the value of your brand.

INDEXATION

Indexation is Google’s process of figuring out what your page is about. In simple terms, Google visits your page and analyzes your content according to certain keywords (i.e., Los Angeles SEO), images, files, and external links. Use indexation to your advantage by creating links to more high-ranking and reputable websites on your page.

You can easily do this by adding pictures and video files from other websites as well as linking back to them directly whenever you refer to any of their written content. Always make sure to credit any original content and link back to their creators—it is the ethical thing to do. Also, link back to your social media accounts to help with the indexing process too.