Integrating Social Media and SEO for Small Business Websites

Marketing Sherpa (don’t you love that name?) came out with new research on the benefits of integrating social media and search engine optimization (SEO) strategies to improve search engine results.  Good news for marketing small businesses!

I started sharing this good news with a business owner when I realized that my “Marketing Speak” was making it difficult for non-marketing folks to understand.  So in keeping with my goal to make leading edge marketing strategies accessible to small businesses, let me define a few marketing terms before giving you my top line summary of the benefits of integrating social media and SEO for small business websites.

Marketing Speak Glossary:

What is SEO again? Search Engine Optimization utilizes strategies & tactics that make it easier for search engines (like Google) to find your website when people search by keywords related to your business.

Why is SEO important to my business? Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN…) display 2 kinds of results for every search:  Paid ads and free or “Organic” results.  80% of people click on the “organic” search results because they find them more credible than paid advertising.

This preference for “organic” search results is good news for small businesses (since “pay per click” advertising can be expensive and time consuming to manage well).  So the goal is to improve your free search engine results as much as possible before spending on paid advertising to drive traffic to your website.

Executive Summary:  Using Social Media to Improve Organic Search Results

Does Social Media impact SEO?

Yes, Sherpa reports that social media can improve search engine rankings.  (More good news for small businesses, since social media is also “free” media).  Social media benefits SEO by:

• Improving search rankings
• Increasing traffic from targeted keywords
• Expanding content shown in universal search results
• Improving the ROI from search programs
• Generating more qualified leads

How does it work?

Social media provides two main things search engines evaluate:  Content and Links.

What should I do?

1. Content: At minimum,  you should be aware that Google is now indexing more content from blogs, Twitter and Facebook.  While your main focus in social media should be “ to provide great content, interact with your audience and build relationships,” you should consider and include relevant keywords while writing that  “great content.”

2. Links: Although many social networks use “no-follow” coding to prevent search engine indexing, linking to valuable content in your social media “updates” is an area of opportunity.  You can get SEO benefits by “adding relevant URLs to your profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter”.

Two easy tactics to integrate social media and SEO to improve your search engine rankings and help drive website traffic:

1. Be sure to include relevant key words when writing social media copy

2. Include URL links to great content in your social media updates

What’s the ROI on integrating social media and SEO?

Right now social media volume is relatively low and these new “real time” searches of social media drive little traffic.  But the return-on-investment of building your SEO savvy and utilizing as many free marketing tactics as possible is high.  Social media volume is growing fast; as is Internet usage of search engines to find and research products and services.

Ready for more depth on social media and SEO?  Read the entire Sherpa Marketing Report on Social Media’s impact on SEO.

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