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Since Google’s algorithm update some have said that this has placed negative effects on a website’s rankings and that especially off-page SEO will become more of a challenge. Others say that it’s about time Google updated its algorithm as its warned search engine marketers to focus solely on delivering high quality content, not to focus on the link and to stop using it as just another broadcast mechanism. What we can start to conclude from the feedback is to simply combine the two entities as SEO should come as second nature when one delves in social media. The two are undoubtedly the perfect combination and when integrated into a campaign can attain very successful results.  This is one of the reasons why selling Social Media Marketing will be easier.

Are you asking yourselves how? The algorithm has opened up opportunities for Social Media and SEO to stand under the spot light and work together. Agencies should continue to sell Social Media to new or existing clients with the intention of convincing them that they need to start embracing the key fundamentals such as dialogues, relationships, communities and many more, which will allow them to reposition their ranks and increase visibility on the search engines. Here are a few tips for doing just that: -

1) Cultivate Relationships

Efforts to gain a link will need to be seen as adding value and not as another means of going down a list of high authority websites and trying to get one. It is important to know who your target audience is and what platforms they are using to converse on, only then can you join the community and start to add value.  By delivering good quality content this will immediately give the reader a reason to link back to you and start sharing it with other like minded people, hence increasing brand reach.

2) Sharing Content

Essentially this is why Social Media exists! Think of it as a vehicle for delivering the content, it is much quicker to create buzz via the content marketing tools, Twitter, YouTube, etc, then just having a website. Other platforms such as social bookmarking sites Digg, Delicious, Reddit, etc, can aim to tap a wider audience. Making content accessible will ensure that prospects and customers will be able to find and hence be more inclined to comment, link or share it via their platforms.

3) Social Signals

Whether it’s a Facebook fanpage or a public profile it is important to be proactive and publish content regularly so as to keep the audience engaged and allow for interactions. It is the interactions wall posts, comments, comment likes, etc, that account for the social signals that all the major search engines look for. The more engagement there is the better the rankings.

Search engine marketing should work with a touch of social. Personally my underlying thoughts on the Google update are that it should start to teach marketers that it is and always will be about ‘them-them-them marketing’ and that there is a need for businesses to execute Social Media campaigns but engage in natural conversation seeding/SEO.