
Does trying to keep up with social media make your head spin? What about utilizing SEO to build your business, does it make your head ache? How do you know whether or not you’re going about your social media and SEO practices all wrong? What is social media, and how is it done anyway? What is SEO, and is it all that important? With a little understanding, you can be better at social media and SEO and use it productively for your business.
What is Content Marketing, and How will it Help your Business?
Content marketing is any marketing that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire and retain customers. Content marketing is also defined as creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience to drive profitable customer action. The keyword being valuable.
Content and social media helps your business by building trust in you and your ability to meet your customers’ needs. Providing useful and valuable information on a consistent basis via blog posts and making that content easy to access and consume on social media, builds trust, brand loyalty, and leads for your products and services.
What is Social Media and SEO?
Social media uses content (posts) via social media networks such as Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc to increase brand awareness, identify key audiences, generate leads, and build meaningful relationships with customers. Posting blog posts to social media networks drives traffic back to your website where your audience will read about you, the solutions you provide and the products and services your business offers.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is activity that attempts to improve search engine rankings. In search results, Google displays links to pages it considers relevant and authoritative. (Note: Each blog post is a new page). Authority is measured by analyzing the number and quality of links from other web pages to your web pages. Simply, your web pages (blog posts) have the potential to rank in Google as long as other web pages link to them.
By producing a consistent stream of valuable content and making use of basic SEO techniques in that content, you can:
- Increase traffic
- Maximize your visibility
Keywords are the single most important components of search engine optimization. They are the words and phrases people type into the search bar to find what they’re looking for.
Once you’ve chosen your keywords, make sure they appear in page titles, body texts, subtitles, meta descriptions, URLs and image captions.
Getting Started with Social Media and SEO
To use social media and SEO productively, there are a few things you need to understand.
- First of all, you must understand how great content drives revenue for your business.
- Second, you must understand you already have all the skills and knowledge needed to create fantastic content to participate on the web in a meaningful way.
Start Small
Don’t overwhelm yourself by trying to do too much, too soon. Pick one or two social media networks to start with. Which social media networks should you choose? The networks your customers are using. To find out which networks they’re using, visit their websites or simply ask them.
Find Out Where the People Are
Look at five companies in your target market that are active in online marketing and visit their sites. If they are blogging, look at the number of shares for each post to see which channel is most active.
Look their social media icons and click through to their social media pages. Which social channels have a large following? Is there a lot of activity there?
Now, Get Going
Start sharing your weekly blog posts, images, quotes and business insider tidbits. Most of all, be real and interact with others often. Respond to comments and share others’ content. As you interact, you’ll learn how to use the social networks where your audience is and when to post different kinds of content. But start. Start by sharing your weekly blog posts and grow from there.
If you are fairly new to social media, take a look at this guide to social media for more in depth information.
Sharing valuable information with your target audience consistently is important to the growth of your business. Getting better at social media and SEO comes by learning and doing.
You don’t need to outsource your blog post creation and social media posting, but if you lack the time it takes to market your business in these ways, call Rockin’ Robin at (307) 631-1867 for a free consultation today. Find out how Rockin’ Robin can market your business with content creation done for you.