search engine optimization Archives

Search engine optimisation (SEO), content marketing (CM), and social media marketing (SMM) might be different tactics but they share a common goal—to increase organic traffic to your website.

SEO works better when paired with the two. Your content pieces will attract more eyes when optimised for search engines and shared on social media. And, you’re likely to improve your social media reach using the right content and set of keywords.

In short, integrating these three techniques enables a digital marketing flywheel that lets you enjoy the best of both worlds and increases your chances of doubling your search traffic.

Understanding the Three Techniques—SEO, CM, & SMM

Search engine optimisation (SEO) focuses on boosting your website presence. It’s all about optimising your site to improve its visibility and rank higher in the search results pages.

Content marketing is the process of creating and sharing content (i.e., videos, blogs, infographics, social media posts, etc.). This discipline relies on SEO to increase brand awareness and consequently—generate visits and drive website traffic.

Social media marketing refers to the use of social media platforms for promoting a business, product or service. Sharing engaging and SEO-optimised content helps increase your brand exposure and boost social media traffic.

Read on to find out how you can increase organic traffic to your website using these three techniques.

Tips for Boosting Organic Website Traffic

1. Optimise for the Search Engines (and Readers)

Ranking on search engines like Google is the primary purpose of search engine optimisation. Broadly speaking, there are three core pillars of SEO: technical SEO, on-page optimisation and off-page optimisation.

Here’s how these optimisation techniques differ:

Technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to the process of meeting the technical elements of modern search engines. It involves strategies, including crawling, JavaScript indexing, rendering, linking, and more.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO is the practice of optimising elements such meta descriptions, headlines, title tags, and content on your website to earn more relevant traffic from search engines. All these on-site elements should include targeted keywords to help your website rank higher.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO on the other hand refers to optimisation techniques done outside your website. Inbound links, social shares, domain age, citations, and reviews are a few of the off-site ranking factors that help improve your search rankings.

While SEO is about befriending the search engines, it’s also crucial that you optimise your website for your readers. So how do you do it? Simple—develop a keyword strategy. You may use long-tail keywords that will identify your website as a destination for a particular topic.

This blog post, for example, is intended for those who want to get more traffic to their website. Using the keywords to increase organic traffic would be effective because there’s less competition for the term and people search for it.

2. Create Content Pieces for Your Buyer Personas

Optimising for search engines is useless if you’re not driving profitable customer or client actions. This is where content marketing comes into action; it connects with your readers and influences them in making purchasing decisions.

To ensure you entice them until the decision stage, create content pieces that fit your buyer personas—fictional yet realistic representations of your target customers. If you haven’t created your audience personas, here are a few tips that may help you in designing them:

Check your existing customers and social audience. Gather information, such as age, location, language, spending power and patterns, interests, challenges, and more.
Learn why they love your products or services. Tapping on social media listening is one way to find out about customer experiences.
Identify customer goals. Are they only researching, looking for reviews, or are they ready to buy?

Once you have buyer personas in place, you can deliver content that will be most relevant and valuable to your audience. The easiest way to use your audience personas is to cater your content to them.

Here are the three stages of the buyer’s journey along with their ideal content types:

Awareness stage: where personas are experiencing that need to be fixed. Blog posts, social media posts, and explainer videos are ideal pieces of content targeting this stage.
Consideration stage: where personas are considering solutions to their pain points. The best content pieces to offer for this stage are product comparison guides, case studies, and free samples.
Decision stage: where personas have decided on their solution or turned into buyers. Examples of ideal content formats for the decision stage are product descriptions, free trials and demos, reviews and customer testimonials.

These stages names sometimes vary. For example, they might be called the ‘Education’, ‘Consideration’, ‘Purchase’ stages instead. The concepts, however, are generally always the same and are tied directly to the market funnel.

3. Promote & Optimise Your Social Media Profiles

Did you know that an optimised social media profile has a high chance of driving organic website traffic? Social media optimisation follows the concept of SEO, where relevant keywords are included in bio sections to make the profiles searchable.

When writing a social media description, be sure to make it keyword-rich. Add relevant keywords naturally, so your target audience can find you in the search. Doing this not only increases your discoverability but also helps increase organic traffic to your website.

Aside from creating keyword-rich descriptions, you can also boost your organic social media reach by doing the following:

Upload a high-quality picture. Your profile picture puts a face to your name, so it must reflect your brand. It should also be recognisable; avoid using an image that has nothing to do with your business.
Add links to your website. Take advantage of social media’s ability to build brand awareness. Include links in your bio section to lead target customers directly to your website.
Use hashtags sparingly. Hashtags are like keywords that categorise the content. Consider adding relevant hashtags to promote your business and boost your visibility.

4. Update Old Web Content & Blog Posts

Here’s another link between SEO and content marketing: when you update your old web content or blog posts, you get Google to crawl your site more frequently. It’s like technical SEO, where search engine spiders crawl your website, but without coding—just upgrading.

Having fresh content is critical for your website because Google favours frequently updated content. If you frequently update your website or articles, Google finds it easier to search for your web pages and add them to the index.

Frequent updates can help you have a better chance of ranking on the search engines. While a higher post frequency doesn’t necessarily increase your overall website rankings, it can increase organic traffic to your website.

Here are some of the best practices for content updates:

The key is quality, not more content. If your blogs are only 300 words long, bumping up the wordcount is a good idea. However, adding paragraphs just for the sake of updating can’t guarantee you good results. It’s necessary to keep your content standards high and write around what your readers want.

Incorporate valuable, targeted keywords. Keywords are a vital part of SEO. Optimise your content for a more relevant keyword. Targeting new keywords can expand your search visibility and help you bring more traffic.

Add new or update old links. Like keywords, internal and external links also play important SEO roles. Interlinking your web pages and linking your blog posts to your website can positively affect your SEO. Revisit your website and blog posts, then do the following:

Find and fix 404. If one of your blog posts is linked to a 404 page, update the link and add a significant link.
Spot outdated references. Blogs typically mention references, such as studies, research, and statistics. External links can build your website authority, so check whether they’re working and update them to more recent findings.

5. Create Meaningful & Evergreen Content

Creating evergreen content doesn’t only increase organic traffic to your website, but it also keeps driving regular traffic to your web pages for as long as you want it. The reason behind this is simple—such content doesn’t go out of date.

Not only does evergreen content stay fresh for readers, but it also remains popular in search engines. Google will find your content relevant, allowing you to become more visible and rank higher in search results pages.

To help you strengthen your evergreen content marketing strategy, we listed some actionable tips that will help you do just that.

- Choose evergreen topics. Keyword tools like Ahrefs can help you look for popular, consistently searched topics. Use such tools to see what keywords have positive trends and build your content around these keywords.

When writing blogs around evergreen topics, avoid using terms with a short lifespan, such as this month, last year, yesterday, and more. If you’re thinking about writing for a relevant year, for example, ‘content marketing best practices in 2021’, update the content every year or ensure the content will remain valid over time.

- Update content when necessary. As discussed in the previous point, Google recognises web pages with fresh content. You should refresh your content as often as necessary to ensure it’s evergreen and increase its chances of driving traffic or attracting leads and shares.
- Build high-quality backlinks. The good thing about evergreen content or regularly update content is that it can generate consistent leads, establish a brand reputation, and above all—give higher search engine rankings.

To ensure your business reaps these benefits, build links to your fresh content, encourage sharing on social media, and consider doing guest posting.

6. Get the Most Out of Social Media Targeting

Social media also holds power in your search rankings. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms can help you reach thousands of customers, which means you get more chances of increasing organic social media reach.

However, publishing content on social media isn’t enough to improve your SEO results. You should also consider capitalising on social media’s ability to reach specific audience types. By choosing who sees your content, targeting ideal audiences and engaging with them becomes easier.

Facebook, specifically, allows you to target any of your posts to a certain demographic. These general demographics include gender, age, relationship, educational status, location, interests, and language.

Suppose you own and run a women’s fashion store in Singapore. You could target your posts to female shoppers who live in or near Singapore and are around 20-40 years of age. Here’s how you can start setting up Facebook targeting:

Click Settings at the top of your page.
From General, check off the box next to Audience Optimisation for Posts.

Follow the steps below to limit your post’s audience.

Click the targeting icon before publishing your post.
Tick Restricted Audience at the top, then select the age and locations of the audience you want to see your post.
Click Save.

To target a specific audience in your newsfeed, use News Feed Targeting.

Click the targeting icon before publishing your post.
In the News Feed Targeting section, enter the criteria of the people you’d like to reach in News Feed.
Click Save.

Also, you could specify when to stop showing your post organically in the news feed—this is called post end date.

SEO, Content & Social Media: Stronger Together

Search engine optimisation, content marketing, and social media marketing are equally essential in helping you increase organic traffic to your website.

One doesn’t outsmart the other as all concepts can raise awareness of your brand, build an audience, and ultimately—convert prospects to customers. Instead of treating them as separate, different practices, why not integrate your SEO into your content and social media marketing strategy, or vice versa?

If you’re up for this idea, 2Stallions(a full-service digital marketing agency) would gladly help you get started. Our team of industry experts will draw your target audience to your website through on-page and off-page SEO, engaging content and improving your social media presence.

Learn more about our complete line of digital marketing services here.

Originally published: 13 August, 2021
Updated: 16 December, 2022

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The battle between social media and search engines has been going on for years. Some believe that search beats social, while others think it’s the other way around.

In this blog, we’re not going to weigh them against each other. Instead, we’ll provide a better understanding of social networks and search engines, so you can put your time, effort, and spend your marketing budget on the appropriate medium.

First, let’s explore the key differences between these two predominant platforms side by side.

Citation Policy: Please feel free to use this infographic anywhere. However, we require a reference back to 2Stallions Blog.

A Closer Look at Social Media & Search Engines

Social media marketing helps companies establish meaningful connections and improve brand loyalty. Search engine optimisation, on the other hand, makes brands more discoverable.

While social media and search engines are conceptually different, they are critical components of a digital marketing strategy. Each medium offers companies unique business opportunities that can contribute to their overall growth and success.

The two, in fact, share common business goals—to attract new customers and expand market reach.

For these reasons, asking the question “Which medium works better?” is more appropriate than “Which medium is better?” Neither social networks nor search engines outdo the other. Each medium serves a specific purpose and is used differently based on the needs of individuals and businesses.

Let’s take a closer look at each medium and how you can best utilise them.

When to Use Social Media

Social media target audiences are based on demographics like age, gender, job title, and education. These factors help you know who your social fans or followers are and what type of content may pull their emotional strings.

Since social media helps you discover your target demographic more easily, you can use this medium to build an engaged audience. Use the demographics as a guide to fine-tune your marketing strategy and reach the right people.

Suppose Facebook is your network of choice. You could analyse metrics, such as comments, reactions, and shares to understand what your audience engages with most. If your video posts gain the most attention, make sure to keep creating more video content that will entice them exactly the same.

It also doesn’t hurt to explore other types of content like blogs, live videos, and images. Blog posts that discuss current trends and news gain better traction, while photos (i.e., memes, quote images, GIFs, snapshots, etc.) grab people’s attention more than text-based content.

Live videos, on the other hand, are becoming increasingly popular on social media platforms because of the high engagement rate. Live streaming creates a direct connection to each viewer—everyone can access a live video, comment on it and even share it with other people.

Social media also binds the link between engagement and brand reputation. With social networks, your reputation is in your hands. You can handle negative feedback and criticisms, address concerns, answer questions, and stay connected with your audience easier.

When to Use the Search Engine

While social media and search engines are both trackable, the latter focuses more on analysing the audience’s intent. Search engines go beyond knowing who your followers are and dig deeper into what they’re thinking.

This explains why search allows for targeted marketing. Website analytics tools like Google Analytics let you measure the total visibility and traffic. You could see what pages or content get the most traffic, how long people stay on your website, and what actions they take on the pages they visit.

Unlike social networks, search engines direct your target audience to you. The keywords or key phrases they type in the search bar lead the customers to your website or social media profiles.

If your primary aim is to drive more traffic to your website, befriending search engines is the key. Search is the first stop on the Internet for most people, so you should optimise your site and its contents for search.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) encompasses three strategies: technical SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO. Here’s a quick comparison of these SEO techniques.

Technical SEO focuses on code and performance improvements on your website.

On-page SEO involves techniques implemented on your website to optimise its overall structure and make it search-engine friendly.

Off-page SEO refers to the optimisation techniques done outside your website to improve its trust factor.

Below are a few optimisation efforts that can double your search traffic:

Improve page load speed
Adopt a responsive website design
Insert keywords into your content (i.e., meta description, title tag, article title, article body)
Create informative and timely content pieces
Share content on your social media accounts
Optimise for voice search
Generate backlinks through business listings, social media marketing, guest posting, and more

Parting Tip – Use Social Media and Search Engines Together

Understand what your needs are and your main priority to know where to spend your marketing resources.

But if you’re determined to get better results from your marketing efforts, we suggest capitalising on social media and search engines.

While social media focuses on audience engagement and search engine tackles on website traffic, both are all about reaching audiences and helping companies grow their business.

This connection between the two implies that they work better when together. Use social media marketing to drive engagement, gain new followers, get more shares and generate traffic to your web content. And invest in SEO to boost your discoverability and increase your customer base.

Do you need someone to do all the work for you? 2Stallions has you covered! Our team brings expertise in all areas of digital performance marketing to the table. We will help you be on the first page of search engines, grow your brand’s social media presence, and more.

Learn more about our host of digital marketing services here.

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