Late last year the search engine Google started to place a huge and very important emphasis on social media, especially on Google+. Facebook and Twitter to a lesser extent, but still these social media platforms, if handled correctly will help with a businesses online rankings.
Most website we are commissioned to design now have the mandatory social media icons at the bottom of each web page within the site. All business owners now agree to this and are actually encouraging this without my prompting. Go back two or three years and no one would have wanted this, but no it is a huge must. The question is, how to integrate all these elements, such as web design, social media and SEO to form a powerful sales tool for your company. Following are just a few simple ideas to get you started and get you thinking about the best course of action.
1. Register your company for most of the well known social media platforms and commence your campaign.
Determine which social media platforms are best for your business and your target audience. For example, if you own a restaurant or pub, you might like to go down the path of Facebook, but if you are a law firm you may choose the LinkedIn option. You have to be very careful what platform you decide to go with as the wrong decision may cost you lots of time and wasted marketing dollars. Your web design team should have a strong handle on this and be able to advice you on the best course of action. Be very aware of their response as their age and work culture may skew their answer. If they are a younger bunch of designers they are bound to favour Facebook, but if you are in a corporate design environment they might go with Google+ or LinkedIn. At the end of the day its your call but be careful about your online positioning when it comes to these platforms.
In terns of SEO, Google+ and registering a +1 in the search results will have an impact on your website if content is posted regularly. The more content you get out there with relevant active links back to your website, the better your online rankings will be.
On top of this, the idea is to generate as many followers as possible so that each time you do post content, this will be shared and discussed amongst your followers as well as across differing channels.
2. Write shareable and exciting content
This is a huge area and needs to be discussed in detail. Google basically loves content. the more web copy that you are able to publish the better it will be for your online rankings. On top of this the better the content and more interesting and topic specific it is the more likelihood there will be of people sharing this content in the social media sphere. This again is great for SEO. Google absolutely loves anything natural and if your content is zooming around the various and many social media platforms in a natural fashion, this will be deemed by the algorithms as natural, therefore increasing the authority of your articles, which in turn will rank them higher. Its a win win situation. All you need to do is have fabulous, well articulated content published online and the rest will take care of itself. Consider, one to two well thought out industry specific articles being posted on your blog every week and see what happens. Once you become an authority in your field, you will find more and more users coming to your site searching for information. They may even be anticipating your posts, which is a great thing. If they go viral, then it is a huge success and you are assured of huge volumes of traffic through to your site.
3. Get more of that great content across as many social media platforms as possible.
Design large and very visible call to action buttons on your posts so readers are encouraged to share them with friends. Be sure to add those big share icons on each post and blog that you write so that people can easily share the posts. The more that your content is out there the better it is. A great idea for your blog is once an article is complete you should be able to tie your blog to your social media platforms, so as soon as you have written the blog is will automatically publish on all channels you have. This is really the best way for Google to index your content on these platforms as well as spreading all your new juicy information online.
What is the benefit to you, the business owner?
Creating online social media content and sharing this can and will over a period of time generate backlinks, which is great for SEO. Although these are not going to be high page rank links that are needed to surge your site up the rankings, none the less, it does show a natural linking profile to Google and hence will be a contributing factor in your online rank. Google absolutely loves this and the more natural your linking profile, the better you will be perceived in the eyes of the engines.
Up to say 1-2 years ago, the mere mention of the words social media to business owners would have been met with odd looks and an ‘all too hard’ attitude. People overall were afraid of this, basically, because they just could not get their head around the whole social media thing. The saw their children on Facebook and for that reason they were unable to make the connection between this type of platform and their business. They felt that because their kids were on it, it was just used for social networking at a teenager level. Fast forward to this year and people are scrambling to become part of this phenomena. Mention social media and people raise their eyebrows and ask how they can now use it to their advantage. Basically, if you are not on this boat, then you will be left behind and your business will suffer.
Embracing these new technologies may seem like a difficult task, but if you have the right people to work with, like the we designers at Hopping Mad Designs, we can help you navigate this not so complicated path. Please call us on 02 9360 8514 to learn a little bit more about this and see how we are able to integrate social media with your web design to enhance your SEO rankings.