The Social Media Marketer

Social Media and SEO – A Perfect Match

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To the list of amazing things that social media can do for you, add "SEO help".  How can social media use help you with your SEO efforts?  Well, we all know that choosing the right keywords for your content is part of Content Marketing 101.  So, where do good keywords come from?  AdWords?  Research?  Educated guessing?

All of the above, but add to the list, your social media network.  In most cases identifying keywords is a combination of what's relevant for the Internet user, his search behavior and, obviously, the activities and goals of the business that wants to be found online.  Keeping your ear to the ground on social media can give you clues for all three aspects of keyword research.

What is the ultimate goal of finding the perfect keywords?  What you want are keywords that pertain to your business and industry and attract relevant visitors to pages that contain content that corresponds with these keywords.  You want keywords that invite the visitor to perform a specific action.  In the end, you want visitors to become leads and, hopefully, customers.

So how can social media add anything at all to these processes?

Well, participation in social media is like real time search, and social media monitoring allows you to "see" what people are looking for in the here and now.  In addition, monitoring tools enable you to see what words people are using on social media when they talk about your business, your industry, your competitors and specific events that interest you.

So if you use these words to enrich your SEO keyword strategy, you get your site ranked with additional keywords that are based upon an analysis of what your target group is looking for on social media.

According to social media marketing group Alterian, using social media monitoring tools can help you develop "theme clouds", which are "the words that most frequently occur in conversations mentioning a specific brand".  "Word clouds", are the result of analyzing all of the conversations.  Silly-sounding terms aside, it's a perfect example of the way social media and SEO can connect.

Monitoring the social media conversations that are relevant to your business will yield theme and word clouds that become your best keywords.  Since these are the terms being used when people are talking about you and your industry, they certainly meet the criteria.  And, you're finding out about them in real time.

It just doesn't get any better than that.