How to Succeed at SEO With Social Media Marketing

Like syrup and pancakes or peanut butter and jelly, search engine optimization and social media are made for each other. Your website and social media channels must work together with keyword-rich content. If it helps attract search engines, it will help your search rankings and therefore increase the amount of eyeballs.

To learn how to make this happen for your brand, I talked to Ray Grieselhuber, CEO and co-founder of Ginzamarkets, Inc. and the Ginzametrics Enterprise SEO Platform.

Hi Ray. Why now, more than ever, is SEO important for marketers?

If you look at the way brands are found online via organic media, the two biggest channels are overwhelmingly search and social. SEO is much more than just ranking well in Google. It's a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary approach to website optimization that ensures potential customers who come to your site will have a good experience, find what they are looking for, and have an easy time sharing your high-quality content.

Visitors from organic search have some of the highest conversion and LTV rates across any channel in digital marketing. When you combine well-orchestrated social campaigns with ongoing search optimization, you are creating leverage and a long-term competitive advantage.

How can social media help?

Until recently, search and social media were thought of as two very different things. At GinzaMetrics, we've always thought of them as two sides of the same coin. As a brand, you can reach customers with paid advertising or organic content. We believe, and our data backs this up, that customers via organic content are much better customers to have over the long run. And when you start mixing paid and organic, the combined lift is overwhelmingly better than paid channels alone.

So, within the context of organic marketing, social media is your primary engine for promoting new content. Effectively organizing your social campaigns and tying them together with new content on your site, optimized for search, can take you from zero visibility to a strong performing position almost overnight.

What are some best practices for incorporating SEO into your social efforts?

Pay attention to the basics first: have high quality content, well-structured pages, follow all of the best practices for SEO. Then look at the metadata that affects how well your content is shared on social media channels, specifically Open Graph tags, proper use of images, authorship metadata (for Google Plus and search results) and more. Finally, you need to learn from your activities, so make sure you have metrics put into place to analyze your performance and see where there is room for improvement.

What do you see as the future of SEO in relation to social media?

I see SEO and social media, as channels, all following under the larger umbrella of organic marketing (which includes content marketing). There is no reason for them to be separated and as budgets further evolve, both the practice of organic marketing and also the supporting technology platforms in the industry will quickly improve to support this new reality.