Brands understand that a strong social media presence is essential for brand recognition, successful content marketing, customer service opportunities, and for search engine friendliness. All of these possibilities sound enticing in theory, but many organizations struggle with the reality of implementing social media strategies to achieve these goals, especially utilizing social media for increased search engine rankings. The best way to control branded SERPs is to position both your website and social media profiles on the first page of Google results. How do you maneuver your profiles to these coveted positions, and how do you direct more users to them? By building links to your social media profiles. Here are some ways how; as an added bonus, all of these strategies will help with both increasing social following and search engine rankings:
Link to your social media profiles from your website. These crosslinks will help increase your social following, and build legitimacy for your sites. Take advantage of icons in the header or footer of your website, but remember: official social media badges, while they make it easy for users to take social action, aren’t the best strategy from a strict link-building point of view. Use them carefully.
Include social links in author bios. Do you contribute to guest blogs, news sites, and forums across your industry? Those are great opportunities to leave social links for your readers to follow.
Ask employees to include company links and handles in their profiles. Including the company handle in a Twitter user bio or linking to a company’s Facebook page from a personal profile is a smart way to create multiple links to a company profile. Just remember that Twitter mentions of this sort are nofollow; luckily, Facebook links are dofollow, and will directly help with SEO.
Crosslink between social media profiles. Several platforms ask brands to include links to its other social properties. These crosslinks are important, particularly on Google+, which creates dofollow links for each social property entered onto a Company Page. Pinterest also has opportunities for brands to crosslink, although these generate nofollow links.
Conduct competitor link research. Your SEO strategy undoubtedly includes researching competitor website backlinks; why not extend the research to social backlinks to find potential opportunities for your brand? CognitiveSEO offers a free Backlink Explorer tool that allows you to explore a competitor’s social profile links, including insight into backlink lists and link growth statistics. This information can help you visualize new opportunities for your brand’s social profiles.
Increasing links to your social profiles helps with search engine rankings, social following, and lead growth. Still need some help beefing up your social platforms? inSegment’s Social Media team is ready to tailor your presence for lead generating and search engine ranking success.