Social Media SEO: 8 Strategies to Dominate Search and Social

SEO and social media are like peanut butter and jelly. While they work great as individual marketing strategies, together, they’re just a match made in heaven for businesses.

Especially for businesses targeting Gen Z.

Recent studies show that Gen Z is bypassing traditional search engines, with 62% using TikTok and 67% using Instagram to find businesses and products. That, coupled with their heavy social media usage - means that businesses cannot afford to ignore social media SEO.

So what does social SEO mean?

Why does your business need to invest time and energy in creating a social media strategy that leverages SEO?

And how can you use your social media marketing plan to outrank your competition, improve brand visibility, and drive leads?

Let’s find out.

Table of Contents
What is social media SEO?
Why is SEO in social media marketing important?
9 best social media platforms for SEO
8 tactics to improve your SEO social media strategy
FAQs about social media and SEO

What is social media SEO?

In a nutshell, this includes using the right hashtags in your content and profile, adding optimized niche-specific keywords in your business description and post captions, optimizing your social images with ALT text, and staying current with SEO trends.

While social signals, social media likes, comments, shares, and even the number of followers you accumulate, do not directly affect Google SERPs, Google’s John Mueller said that social content can indirectly drive website traffic.

Why is SEO important in social media marketing?

In the past, businesses used to list their companies in online directories, leverage link exchange platforms, and even mass submit links to social bookmarking sites.

Now, things have changed dramatically.

Social media has made boosting brand visibility and generating website traffic and leads a lot easier.

Increased reach and visibility

Over 5 billion people currently use social media.

This emphasizes on how important it is to meet your potential customers where they are and offer them high-quality, irresistible content to increase brand visibility and awareness.

This is what social media marketing and SEO is all about.

The more SEO-optimized your content is, the more reach and, as a result, the more engagement you’ll get, with SEO social media strategies helping you grow your brand little by little.

That’s how social algorithms work.

Enhanced brand awareness that helps brand associations with niche-specific topics

Creating content that focuses on the specific pain points of your buyer personas and using the exact keywords your target audience uses in your content and profile, both, is key to enhancing brand awareness.

When you build a relevant niche-specific brand, your target audience will find it easier to search for you when they specifically need a solution you’re providing.

Improved website engagement and traffic

SEO for social media is key to generating website traffic and even backlinks, albeit indirectly.

Good content on social media will drive people to your profile. From there, they should find a link to your website and maybe decide to click on it.

Once landing on your website, they might browse a little, find more useful information, and decide to link to various pages or blog posts. Or who knows, with a bit of luck, even turn into customers.

Also, if you share a blog post or a product post from your website to your social platforms, chances are to see an uptick in website engagement, too.

In short, social media and SEO are complementary marketing strategies since they have a snowball effect.

Better user experience

Optimizing your social media profile and social content for SEO improves user experience.

Here’s how.

The more relevant keywords you add to your profile and social content, the easier and quicker it is for your audience to find your content, simplifying the user journey and offering a more satisfying experience.

Using the right hashtags, playlists (in the case of YouTube), categories, and tags helps with content organization, allowing users to navigate and discover related posts more efficiently.

Competitive advantage

While over 65 million businesses are using social media as a marketing tactic, not all of them have a strong, SEO optimized social profile. And even less create high-quality social content.

So, social media content optimization and strong social profiles are key to standing out, outranking your competition, and getting discovered faster by your target audience.

Let’s take Morning Brew and Tech Crunch's Instagram accounts. They are both in the news and media industry, sharing tech news and analysis.

But which of the two takes the lead on social media?

Morning Brew wants to make business news more enjoyable to read, and they are targeting the younger generation, those under 30.

Tech Crunch started as a website and then moved its communication to social media.

If you want to choose a media publisher to read the tech news every morning, which is more suitable for you?

I think you will prefer Morning Brew because they consistently deliver informative and witty content, and their engagement is 5 times greater than that of Tech Crunch.

Cross-platform consistency

SEO best practices include creating strong social profiles - where consistency is kept across all social platforms.

This includes keeping the same keyword-optimized description, the same profile picture, the same level of high-quality content across all mediums and platforms, and so on.

Popeyes, everyone’s favorite crispy chicken fast food brand, is a great example of this. They’ve kept their profile picture, brand colors, and description the same across all social platforms.

Here's its Instagram profile:

And here's its TikTok profile:

Consistency across all social platforms reinforces your brand identity, helps you take an integrated approach to SEO, and makes it easier for users to find and recognize your business across the internet.

So, when performing a social media audit and performance evaluation, take a look at social media branding elements as well to ensure consistency is kept at all times, thus adhering to first-hand social media best practices.

Insightful analytics and ROI measurement

SEO strategies often involve doing a social media analysis and tracking performance metrics. This data provides valuable insights into what types of content resonate with your audience and what needs improvement, insights that are most valuable for a social media strategist.

That is why it’s recommended to start your SEO optimization plan with a thorough brand audit. This will allow you to understand how to boost your content, from both a strategic point of view and an SEO perspective.

Which of your posts are getting the highest engagement?

What kind of content is driving website traffic?

How are optimized posts (with keyword integrations and ALT texts) performing against less optimized posts?

Mindfully applying SEO strategies on your social media profile and content helps you track key social media metrics and measure your social media ROI.

This in turn helps you make informed decisions and optimize future campaigns for better results.

Support for overall digital marketing goals

What are your overall marketing goals?

Get more leads? More website traffic? Or simply to boost brand visibility?

SEO social media optimization is the one strategy that supports them all.

How?

By driving traffic to your website, improving brand visibility on social platforms and search engines, and engaging with your audience on multiple fronts, social SEO creates an integrated marketing strategy that supports your overall business objectives.

Increased conversion opportunities

When users find relevant and valuable content, they are more likely to take desired actions, such as visiting your website, signing up for a newsletter, or making a purchase.

Optimized content and social profiles are more likely to rank higher in social search engines and user feeds and get more engagement and visibility. This can lead to potential customers discovering your brand and buying from you.

Especially with in-app shopping features like Instagram Shopping and TikTok shop gaining popularity now. So, if you have a strong SEO strategy on social media, you can get a slice of this high social shopping conversion pie.

Adapting to algorithm changes

Search engines and social media platforms both frequently update their algorithms.

An SEO strategy helps you stay ahead of these changes by continuously optimizing your content based on the latest best practices and trends, ensuring sustained performance and brand visibility.

9 best social media platforms for SEO

It seems like every day, new social media pops up, and businesses scramble to create a strong presence on it.

But which are the ones that truly have potential when optimized for SEO? Let’s find out.

YouTube

When creating your social media and SEO strategy, start with platforms that are more tailored toward being a search engine by themselves, such as YouTube, for example.

YouTube SEO is known to be a key discoverability tactic for brands.

YouTube is a search engine itself, second only to Google, and SEO optimization on YouTube is crucial.

To increase YouTube video discoverability, rank higher in YouTube’s search engine, and gain long-term value from your YouTube marketing content, you need to leverage YouTube SEO.

Unlike other social platforms, YouTube is owned by Google and gets a place in Google’s search engine rankings.

If Google thinks a search query might be better answered with a video, it will often include video results (mostly from YouTube, but sometimes from other social platforms, too) in its SERPs.

The more SEO-optimized your YouTube videos, the better its chance at getting higher ranking on Google and YouTube’s own search engine.

YouTube SEO tips include:

• Organizing videos in multiple playlists to improve user experience;
• Adding closed captions to your videos to improve searchability;
• Creating attractive custom thumbnails for all your videos;
• Using end screen and cards to increase watch time and channel exploration.
• Use Shorts to maximze your business impact.

X (formerly Twitter)

Does having an optimized X presence have any effect on your Google ranking?

Yes!

By having an X SEO strategy in place, you’ll make sure that Google indexes and ranks content in its search results - as an X post or even an X profile.

Similarly, X’s own search engines also reward optimized profiles and tweets by showing them higher when X users search for a specific term.

TikTok

The US alone has over 121 million TikTok users. And an average user spends 58 minutes and 24 seconds every single day.

This makes TikTok SEO a must for brands and businesses.

An optimized TikTok profile and optimized TikTok content, with TikTok hashtags, will help you get higher search rankings on TikTok and Google, both.

Google is now getting serious about indexing more video content, and even experimenting with a Short Video tab, all of which is going to massively benefit TikTok marketers.

Instagram

With over 1.35B monthly global users, Instagram is one of the most popular short-form video social platforms presently. If you want to improve brand discoverability on Instagram, you need to leverage SEO strategies.

Two of the most important SEO elements on Instagram include adding relevant, niche-specific keywords within your profile description and captions, and adding ALT text to your posts.

This improves brand and content discoverability, user experience, and accessibility.

Facebook

With the highest number of monthly users - and constantly rolling out new updates and features like Meta AI and cross-chat support, it is one of the most important social platforms for businesses and marketers.

This is why Facebook SEO is an integral part of every marketer’s arsenal.

Facebook SEO tips include creating a personalizable URL that integrates your brand’s name (thus facilitating discoverability), and managing mentions and reviews.

And remember, bad reviews are opportunities in disguise to highlight your exemplary customer service. Acknowledge the bad review, offer support, help resolve the matter, and ask them to reconsider their rating.

Be polite and proactive like Wendy’s here.

An unhappy customer can easily turn into a loyal customer if you listen to their woes and resolve them. They’ll also likely refer you to friends and family and write you a positive review.

The more engagement you receive on your page, the better your SEO. So don’t ignore negative reviews.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn SEO is essential for businesses and individuals who want to get discovered by and network with career focused LinkedIn users.

Creating a profile is not enough, you need to optimize it by making use of the following LinkedIn SEO tips.

• Leverage the different networking features LinkedIn offers - like LinkedIn articles, LinkedIn pages, Knowledge panels, Slideshare content, and LinkedIn communities. This will increase your profile and brand visibility in front of your target audience repeatedly.

• Write a keyword-rich headline for your profile, incorporating niche-specific keywords, too. Here's Socialinsider's LinkedIn page:

• Use a custom URL with your name or brand for better searchability.

• Add ALT text for all the images you upload in your profile section and feed.

Pinterest

Pinterest SEO involves optimizing your pins, boards and your profile to increase brand visibility, engagement, and reach on both Pinterest and external search engines.

Pinterest SEO tips include,

• Participating in industry and niche specific group boards to increase brand reach and visibility.
• Using relevant 2 to 5 hashtags in your pins description.
• Writing keyword-rich pin descriptions, with a link to your landing page.

For example, Lush has clearly highlighted their main keywords, ‘eco-friendly’ and ‘responsibly-sourced’, in their description, along with a link to their website.

• Setting up rich pins for your website.

The higher the monthly profile views on Pinterest, the more traffic you can send over to your website.

Quora

Quora is a powerful tool to use for social SEO given that Quora has a high-domain authority.

Having a strong and optimized presence on Quora benefits businesses (especially B2B ones) in multiple ways:

• Helps you gain more visibility on both Quora, and external search engines.
• Drives targeted traffic to the website.
• Creates networking opportunities with like-minded individuals.

So make use of the following Quora SEO tips to reap these benefits:

• Create a strong, optimized Quora profile with niche-specific keywords, your USP, credential, and the right links.
• Target long-tail keywords in your answers and your Quora profile description.
• Use relevant external links in your answers to add authenticity.
• Answer new questions instantly to gain early visibility.

Reddit

Google’s been loving Reddit lately.

And it has decided to reward Redditors with high search engine rankings after its latest Google algorithm update,

Why? Because Google loves fresh, highly valuable content and Reddit threads provide constant fresh content.

Reddit SEO tips include optimizing your profile, your content, and your participation in sub-reddits so that you gain more visibility on Reddit and outside it.

8 tactics to improve your SEO social media strategy

You know social SEO is the ultimate marketing strategy to meet your business and social media goals. But what are some social media SEO best practices that can help you improve your brand’s visibility?

#1. Optimize your profiles for SEO

Your social media profiles are like your shop’s storefront in a crowded market.

It needs to instantly attract the attention of shoppers, intrigue them and welcome them in, help them browse through the shop, and then turn them into customers.

Just like a well designed and welcoming storefront will attract more customers, a well optimized social media profile will also attract more followers, encourage more engagement, and drive more traffic to your website.

So what do you need to do?

Create a strong, keyword-rich profile description

Make a list of relevant niche-specific keywords and add them naturally to your bio or description. When a user searches for these keywords, your profile will pop up.

Create a custom username (vanity URL) for all your social media pages.

Ensure brand consistency across all your social profiles by keeping the same username, same profile picture, same description, and same branding (logo, color scheme, content quality) same.

Add location, website links, and a clear CTA to your profile

Adding location to your profile improves local SEO and discoverability of your brand, especially if you have an offline presence, too. It helps target local audiences as well, which further improves conversions.

Adding a website link or a landing page link with a clear call to action on your profile is an excellent way of driving website visitors and generating leads.

Showcase your best content with pinned videos and images

Most social platforms like Instagram, Twitter, etc allow users to pin 1 to 3 posts on their profile. Leverage this feature and pin your best content to instantly attract users that come to your profile.

#2. Optimize your content for SEO

The more optimized your content, the more eyeballs it will attract. And the more reach it gets, the more engagement you get on your posts and your profile.

That’s not all, optimized content does really well on Google, too.

It has high chances of getting backlinks from other businesses and influencers. It establishes your authority - and Google loves content that demonstrates Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T).

So how do you optimize your content?

Do a keyword and SEO hashtag research for your content

There are two ways of discovering the right keywords and hashtags when doing SEO for social media.

Use the native platforms to get top suggested social media searches.

Search for your industry on social media search engines and then go through some of the trending keywords and hashtags that pop up.

Conduct a competitor analysis and get their keywords and hashtags.

Want to know what keywords your competitor is using to rank higher?

Conduct a competitor analysis or industry analysis.

For example, Wholefoods uses keywords like bakery, meal prep, #berrychantillycake on TikTok and gets a lot of hits on their videos.

As a competitor bakery, you can easily use some of these or similar hashtags and keywords on your content to increase views and engagement, and improve the SEO of your whole account.

This is where Socialinsider comes in.

To discover keywords that your competitors are using, add their social media profiles to Socialinsider’s dashboard and search through posts by keywords or hashtags.

Make a list of all the trending keywords and hashtags, and use them in your social content.

Add ALT text to your social media content

When doing social engine optimization, the ALT text is an important element.

In this age of inclusivity, ALT (alternative) text allows people with visual disability to know what your picture is all about. It also helps give context to users when images fail to load.

And most importantly, it also helps the social algorithm understand your visual content a lot better, helping you get better search rankings.

So, write a concise but descriptive alt text for all your social images.

Include closed captions and transcripts

85% of Facebook video is watched with the sound off.

So, how do you get your message across to your audience? Via captions.

Use editing apps like CapCut and Subly to easily add captions to your videos.

#3. Analyze and monitor your social media performance

How do you know what content of yours is tanking and which one’s getting the best results?

By constantly monitoring and testing it.

Don’t forget followers and engagement are crucial for social SEO.

By using Socialinsider, you can monitor social media metrics such as: followers' growth, engagement, reach, and more.

Set up UTM parameters for each social media link to measure traffic and make use of your website’s Google Analytics to further track where traffic and leads are coming from.

Create regular social media reports to compare performance with previous periods to see if your goals are being met or not.

#4. Engage with your audience

Social media algorithms absolutely love engagement. The more comments and shares you receive on your content, the more people it’ll reach.

Gary Vaynerchuk’s $1.80 engagement tip is an excellent way of upping your social media engagement and growing your following organically.

• Find 10 niche-specific hashtags in your industry..
• For each hashtag, comment on 9 popular posts.
• Leave thoughtful comments (your "two cents").
• Do this daily - 90 comments total.

The name comes from 90 comments x $0.02 (two cents) = $1.80 in daily "investment".

Once you start engaging with these brands and influencers, they’ll return the favor and engage with you on your posts. This creates momentum and gets your brand more visibility and reach. This is how social media and SEO work great together.

When you start getting good engagement on your social profiles, make sure to answer every commenter and DM-er. This increases your content’s social media reach and forms goodwill with your audience.

#5. Create short videos using your audience’s specific terms

The more specific and targeted your short videos, the better their reach and engagement.

Start by researching your target audience’s pain points  - send them surveys, ask them on social media, go through your industry’s topic threads on Reddit and Quora, and consult your sales and customer service team to see what are some common pain points that frequently come up.

Once you have a list of topics, start creating short but highly targeted videos on them.

Allocate one pain point for one video, use the exact terms your target audience uses, and ensure each video is under 15 seconds.

#6. Repurpose your best-performing content through high-quality visuals

Is your YouTube video doing really well in terms of engagement and leads?

Time to repurpose it into multiple pieces of content to post on different social platforms.

Some of the ways you can repurpose your content into different pieces of content include:

• Take different parts of the video and turn it into a series of short TikToks

• Repurpose your best-performing blog posts or YouTube videos into Instagram carousels

Social media algorithms love profiles that continuously post content - so this is an excellent way to regularly post on your profiles and increase brand and content visibility.

#7. Collaborate with influencers and other brands to expand your reach

People rely on word of mouth more than ever now.

88% of consumers say that they trusted recommendations from people they know, above all other forms of marketing messaging. It is also 2-10 times more effective than paid ads.

Daniel Wellington, a watch company, is a great example of influencer marketing done right.

It collaborated with over 7000 influencers (micro and macro, both) and generated around a million posts with the hashtag #danielwellington.

The result?

It grew from $15,000 starting capital to $220 million in revenue in just 4 years through its influencer marketing efforts.

Even their current highest-performing TikTok post is a recent collaboration with an influencer.

So what better way to encourage people to buy your products than to collaborate with popular micro and macro influencers and well-known brands on social media?

#8. Stay connected with trends and algorithm changes

SEO on social media is all about keeping on top of all current algorithm changes and evolving your social strategy accordingly.

How do you discover the latest social media trends and algorithm changes?

The number one thing is to keep an eye on your analytics and understand what the impact of optimized content.

Here's how:

1. Start by tracking key metrics of your social media content - engagement, views, post reach.
2. Next, correlate your analytics with your post’s SEO optimization. Are the posts that were more carefully optimized performing better compared to the other?
3. Follow SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) to get trends and find out the algorithm's changes.
4. Experiment with different strategies and monitor your analytics to see what’s reaping results now.

Final thoughts

Social media is crucial in the present age. But it’s not as simple as just creating an Instagram, Facebook or TikTok profile and expecting leads and potential customers to pour in.

With well over 65 million small businesses using social media for marketing, you need to up your marketing game on social media to stand out.

This is where using social media for SEO becomes paramount  - creating a carefully curated, optimized social media profile and content for your audience will ensure higher discoverability.

FAQs about social media and SEO

How is SEO used in social media marketing?

Using social media as a search engine involves optimizing social profiles with relevant keywords, using hashtags strategically, creating high-quality, viral-worthy, keyword-rich content, encouraging engagement and backlinks, collaborating with influencers, and constantly monitoring key metrics.

How do social media and SEO work together?

SEO and social media marketing complement each other, by amplifying content visibility and brand awareness, increasing social media reach and engagement and link-building opportunities.

What are the main differences between classical SEO and social media SEO?

While traditional classical SEO targets search rankings on search engines, social media SEO works on social media visibility.

Both social media platforms and search engines have different algorithms so classical and SEO for social media follow rules of their respective algorithms. Where classical SEO relies on backlinks, content quality, and site structure; social SEO prioritizes engagement, shares, and follower count.