Many people misunderstand the connection between social media ads and search engine optimisation (SEO). It seems like many business owners and digital marketers are too busy worrying about how much social media can affect their organic SEO, and not enough time working the two together to create an effective, all-encompassing strategy.
Does Social Media Help eCommerce SEO?
While digital marketers agree that having a social media presence does improve organic rankings for a website, there’s still a lot of speculation about how much search engines factor in these “social signals” when ranking websites.
Don’t worry about the specifics too much, however. Once you start engaging your audience on websites like Facebook and Twitter, you might realise that there are more benefits from the indirect effects.
On top of that, you don’t need to understand how it works to know that it does – and take advantage of it.
How to Leverage Social Media Ads to Enhance eCommerce SEO Rankings
The first step to taking advantage of social media for SEO rankings is to accept that social media isn’t just for selling products. You can indeed sell your products with social media ads, but if all you want is to sell, then there are lots of better alternatives – such as AdWords and pay-per-click advertising.
Rather than thinking of social media ads as solely a sales channel, you should think of them as a way to connect directly to customers and interact with them. Use the opportunity to create an emotional connection with potential customers and clients.
Given that most social media sites such as Facebook are so robust, advertising through them is a great way to establish that initial connection. The indirect effects of establishing a link to your audience, and what it can do for eCommerce SEO rankings, are invaluable.
Social Media Ads Can Assist With Link Building
Most social media experts can tell you about the connection between social media and link generation. When used correctly, social media link building strategies create a symbiotic relationship with SEO.
Creating high-quality social media posts will encourage people to link to them, creating plenty of backlinks to your website. Your followers will share your posts and your website on social media sites, comment sections, forums, and other digital hangouts.
While all that is happening, your link building campaigns will increase traffic to your website in both a direct and indirect way. The result is that you get more followers on social media.
This is what we mean by a symbiotic relationship between link building and social media. The more you use social media, the more links you create, which leads to more success on social media.
Since platforms such as Facebook retain so much data about users, you should have no problem finding – and reaching – your target market. Facebook lets you search by age, location, and interests to put your ads in front of people who are most likely to interact with them.
Once you start to generate a real audience, you need to figure out how to engage them and turn them into customers. Keep in mind that the average Facebook user doesn’t go there to buy products as soon as they see them.
Rather than using social media ads to sell to people who aren’t interested at the moment, use them as a way to engage the audience, entertain them, and interact with them.
This is an area where advertising through Facebook is incredibly valuable. Facebook will only show posts from businesses if the page has a lot of engagement already.
This makes it challenging to get new followers on your page, especially during the first stages of a campaign. This is why you should use social media ads to build engagement and brand awareness rather than selling to customers.
Run contests and send people to relevant and exciting information. Take out ads designed to get followers to engage with you. Increasing engagement improves organic eCommerce SEO.
Social Media Ads Increase Exposure
Advertising on social media means that your eCommerce brand reaches a wider audience, improving overall brand awareness for your store.
Google will take note if people start searching for branded keywords related to your business. The more people using your branding, the more authoritative and popular you seem to search engines. This leads to better rankings in results pages.
Building your brand and gaining exposure is essential for every business, particularly startup companies and new eCommerce companies. Many business owners tend to undervalue the importance of exposure, however, because it doesn’t directly lead to increased sales and revenue.
Rank Social Media Profiles in Search Engines
One way to think of SEO is by seeing search engine results pages as land you need to conquer. Think back to the last time you searched for branded keywords and particular brands. No doubt, you would have seen a lot of social media profiles in the rankings.
Social media profiles generally rank below the homepage for a branded keyword. Even so, people often check social media profiles first when searching for brands.
With social media profiles and ads, you could hypothetically fill up an entire results page with just social media profiles, allowing people interested in your products to have all the information they could possibly need.
There is an excellent reason why major corporations spend so much time and money on their social media presence and advertising on social media. Improving your business image on social media allows you to interact with customers like never before.
Social media ads and SEO go together hand-in-hand – more than most people realise. Traditional advertising is still a valuable tool that should be part of any effective SEO campaign.
Don’t be afraid to have social media ads that connect to your important pages to improve SEO.
There are lots of ways to use SEO and social media ads. Talk to eCommerce SEO experts about how to best use these platforms for your eCommerce business.
