Don’t fall into the common misconception that SEO and social media are separate entities, each operating in their own world with distinct—but different—goals. SEO and organic social media marketing work in tandem to create value and provide relevance to your audience—i.e, your clients. Any great digital marketing strategy should do its best to have both SEO and social media working together, with experienced strategists who know and understand your brand and the message of your business working behind the scenes to make it happen.
An effective social media strategy has a solid SEO plan in place because both of them go hand-in-hand. Whether it’s through content promotions, boosted engagement, link building, increased brand awareness, or helping to build your site’s domain authority and credibility, you should leverage your social media and SEO strategies so that they are working toward a common goal—reaching your dealership’s target audience.
Here are five ways in which social media and SEO go hand-in-hand:
1. Increased Brand Awareness through Social Media Improves Your SEO Rankings
One way that social media contributes to SEO is through increasing your brand awareness. Growing your audience and building a strong brand is a huge part of any online marketing campaign, social media marketing being no different. By validating your reputation on social media through increased engagement and by publishing consistent, high-quality content, you will increase your online brand presence.
Your social media profiles and pages help you create a relationship with your target audience. With consistent social media posts and updates and by supplying quality information to your audience on a regular basis, they recognize and build trust with your brand. This may not lead to an immediate sale, but when the time comes for a new vehicle to be purchased, your dealership will be top of mind.
When more shoppers become aware of your product or service, you’ll find the click-through rate on your content will increase search engine result pages. Google and other search engines give immense importance to click-through rates, and this can significantly impact your rankings and increase your visibility. This will then lead to more branded searches on Google over time. And the more branded searches your dealership receives, the higher it’s likely to rank for non-branded keywords.
By building brand awareness on social media, you also have more people specifically searching for your dealership. This then goes on to boost the organic search traffic to your website and as well as your social media pages/profiles.
2. Social Sharing Can Lead to Link Building
Social media can also lead to authentic, high-quality links from influential websites. Social media is useful for SEO because it encourages more external sites to link to your content, and the more diverse external links you have, the more authority you’ll gain in Google’s eyes. The catch is that you have to have high-quality, authoritative content or you will have nothing of real value to attract links. The digital strategists at Dealer Authority work to make sure you have not only have diverse external links and effective, specific keywords but that your site’s content is high-quality and influential, as well. This content, connected with the social media posts for your dealership, work in tandem to drive the most appropriate traffic to your pages.
By focusing your efforts on stronger social media marketing, you are more likely to attract the right type of backlink opportunities. When your content has a higher number of social media shares, it is gets noticed. Not only by influencers/power users in your local area or business field, but also by many relevant webmasters/bloggers who might want to link to you.
3. Social Media Allows for Content Promotion
Gone are the days when social media was only about likes and shares. Today, it’s all about leverage.
It’s about making your content engaging enough so that it is shared and seen not just by anybody, but by the right people. Given that you are publishing and sharing high-quality content on social media, your content should be able to generate a higher amount of engagement and backlinks, too.
The first way that social media can (indirectly) help your search engine ranking is through content promotion. Social media allows you to take the quality content you have worked hard to produce and promote it on several different channels—say, Facebook and Instagram. Social media is the easiest and most effective way to push out your SEO-based content. While the incoming links from your social media shares don’t have the same impact as authentic links from high-quality sites and blogs, they can influence your engagement and bounce rates.
If your content is good and people are viewing it, those engagement metrics communicate value to search engines. Your goal should be to translate your best organic content into social media content so you can promote engagement and drive traffic back to your site—which is exactly what we do here at Dealer Authority.
4. Social Media Encourages More Engagement
Have you ever heard the saying, “engagement is everything?” Well, now you have! One of the top ways that social media can improve your site’s SEO is through increased audience engagement.
Keep in mind that engagement matters for SEO if you want to take full advantage of social media to promote your high-quality content. Engagement helps to not only improve your online reputation but also to make connections with potential clients and to generate leads for your dealership. Content that gets lots of engagement on social media platforms will rank for the topics they cover.
Think about it—you want your followers to communicate with you, to share your posts with their own followers, and to connect to your landing pages. The best way to do this is through promotion on social media. The more relevant content you post, the more your audience will react, and the more traffic you will ultimately bring in.
5. Social Media Helps Build Domain Authority
The team here at Dealer Authority knows a thing or two about authority if we do say so ourselves. Search engines give a lot of weight to a website’s authority, making it a critical SEO factor to focus on. Search engines equate value with authority—if your page or site has high value, it has high authority.
The authority of a webpage grows over time. As you keep publishing top-notch content and gaining more relevant backlinks, your domain authority continues to grow. The content that you publish, if valuable, gives your audience what they’re looking for. Which, in turn, earns you backlinks—a win-win situation.
Back when social media didn’t exist, the link-building world was different. Fast forward to today, however, and you can’t ignore social media when talking about building backlinks. Why? Because a good chunk of content on the web is distributed via social media. By focusing on building an engaged network of social media followers, your content has more relevant places to thrive. And the more relevant places it thrives in, the more authority you gain. For instance, if you create content about a Honda Accord and get backlinks from blogs that specifically write about the Honda Accord, you get a gold star from Google. It’ll know that you’re publishing content that is reaching a relevant audience. And this, in turn, is fantastic for building your online authority.
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So to sum it up: social media and SEO are more powerful when used together, so why miss the opportunity to leverage them? Contact Dealer Authority today to make an appointment to speak to one of our digital or social strategists. We’ll set you up with a strategy you’ll appreciate that’s tailored specifically to you.