We all know that social media and SEO cannot be separated. While SEO provides you with content that viewers will find useful and relevant to your industry, social media will provide you engagement and the means to distribute or share those content. However, the big question is, how will your SEO content reach the right audience when you don’t have a social media following here in Orange County? And worse, nobody engages with your social media accounts?

Growing your audience or followers is a slow and rigorous process but when done consistently, it will help your overall ranking. Remember though that Google has a way of determining the quality of your followers so if you’re thinking of buying followers for the sake of obtaining instant popularity, it wouldn’t do much for your rankings. Everything has to be done organically.

So the big question is, how can you increase your following for your SEO content to reach a large audience?

1. Optimize your Social Media Bio, Posts or Description for Search. Neil Patel  pointed out that social media is the new SEO and if you optimize these with right keywords, hashtags for description, or blog content with the right keywords, it will go a long way to increase your ranking and your following. How? Take this as an example. If you’re new in Twitter and your business is in Orange County, typically, you search for followers who are in Orange County. With Twitter’s search field, you can add following by typing in your focus area and the industry you want to build a following  (i.e., if you’re a dentist in orange county, you search for keywords and hashtags that has the words “orange county, teeth, dental, dentist, dental check up, etc” and start following those accounts. In turn, those who search for “dentist orange county” can easily see you if your social media description fits want they want to follow or if they find the content you post as relevant to want they are looking for.

Here’s a few facts worth pondering about:

• Twitter handles 19 billion searches per month as of 2010.
• Facebook has over 1 Billion daily searches on the same year.
• There’s over 3.7 million search queries done on Youtube as of March 2010.

Just think of how many search and queries are done now that there are additions to the accounts created on each of these platforms.

2. Build and Increase your Inbound Links. Inbound links are crucial to increase the time users spend on your website. So how does this help increase your social media following? When you post relevant and unique content on your social media, it attracts bloggers and social media influencers to link back to your post; and when they do, they share it to their own following thus increasing not just inbound links but your own audience and eventually their followers becomes yours too.

3. Engage and start conversations. In communicating comes liking and in liking comes following. This is how social media accounts are recognized. Useful comments made on blogs and replying to inquiries make people think that your company and brand is real thus increasing organic followers which is favored by search engines like Google.

4. Never forget other search engines like Bing. Unlike Google, which changed their stance on the influence of social signals to SEO, Bing never changed their stand and I quote them through Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land’s interview:

“We do look at the social authority of a user. We look at how many people you follow, how many follow you, and this can add a little weight to a listing in regular search results. It carries much more weight in Bing Social Search, where tweets from more authoritative people will flow to the top when best match relevancy is used.”

 And Bing also value links being shared commonly on social media accounts:

“We can tell if something is of quality on Facebook by leveraging Twitter. If the same link is shared in both places, it’s more likely to be legitimate.”

So to build additional following on the second largest search engine, optimize your business on Bing too!

The entire purpose of the web is to build relationships, share ideas and foster relationships- in short, it serves a social purpose and SEO does the same! With it’s implementation of UI metrics, it aims to make the web a useful, relevant and user-friendly place thus one cannot do without the other.

Need help and advice on social media and SEO strategies that work in order to build a following here in Orange County? Call us at (949) 800-6990 today!