How Your Website fits with Search Engine Optimization and Social Media

The question that I will pose is how do web analytics, search engine optimization, and social media all fit together? Ultimately, these three should benefit and enhance your digital experience. I think they do, but like everything else, “it’s complicated”. There is a great deal of gray, and that gray is often centered around the search engines. (This is as it should be as they are protecting their algorithms.) Knowing how to make everything fit together for a better synergy is a challenge that can take a while to figure out.

In my opinion, the big takeaway here should be that SEO can impact social, especially as to what gets chosen/read/followed on social media. Social also impacts SEO (through visits, reputation, and authority), and both drive traffic to your site that determines what happens while someone is on the site.

This impact is then measured by analytics (and other tools including customer experience and use experience), which can be used to improve the site and overall online engagement. This starts the circle of improving social, traffic, and visitor behavior. The key link between web analytics, social, and your website SEO is continuous improvement for your online efforts and brand opportunities. And this is something that never really ends. It evolves and hopefully gets better as we move forward in time.

This is important. Everything works together in the digital space. But the reality is that you do not “own” everything. A related takeaway I find important is this: An organization’s website or blog is the one place on the wild, woolly web where you as a marketer can exert complete control. You can gauge the efforts of your SEO efforts (brand authority through content, promotion, on-page structure/navigation) and your social media activity in how it impacts what should be your main online presence. Whatever happens there can be measured, evaluated, and changed.

This is one of the reasons that having a site effectively optimized for on-page and technical SEO is still very important. If you optimize your page for these factors and have solid content, you stand a significantly better chance of ranking, especially if you have a value proposition that also sets you apart. And as an added feature, having the site optimized will also help you greatly with off-page SEO.

Off-page has a number of variables that can help. Many live in the digital world (links, communities, press releases, guest blogging, and more) and some live in the real world (point-of-sale, events, billboards). But off-page SEO can be fickle (although important), and often takes a great deal of time. This is a given that unless you are lucky, off-page is a process. Let me repeat one more time: off-page is incredibly effective but it takes time. But what happens on your page belongs to you.

People tend to forget that social media pages/accounts only offer a certain amount of control and that how your online promotional activity presents when not on your site may also only offer limited control. Platforms controlled by third parties (such as portals, local directories, Facebook pages) are subject to the whims and changes of their owners. So, while these social media platforms are very important for SEO and the health of our brand, they cannot, or should not be the hub if your organization owns a website. For example, your Facebook or Twitter page never really belongs to you, and the rules can be changed or recreated at any point in time. This is the ultimate dilemma with social media.

Don’t get me wrong: social media is important…incredibly important. It is critical for driving traffic to your site and possibly your other social media presences. It can be very helpful to you in achieving your goals and gaining recognition.

It is still a very big deal, but the face of social media continues to shift. Facebook is not quite what it was, especially as relates to engagement, and Instagram is making way for TikTok. Snapchat is not what it was 4 or so years ago when Pokemon Go was going gangbusters. It is still big but essentially has leveled off since 2016/17. Twitter is making a resurgence in 2020 (thank you pandemic) but had been level for many years prior to that. Pinterest is growing rapidly, which is surprising, and I think that more and more people want to curate content.

Also, the social analytics used by the social media platforms do not always equate to effectiveness from a brand owner’s perspective. They tend to more represent the interests of the platform. Shares and comments are what you are hoping for — as this is true engagement — and are significantly better than likes and follows. This is important to grasp and is why Chris Lake’s Interaction Index is still an important concept today. Engagement and loyalty, along with having the target audience that will respond to engagement and loyalty is significantly important.

What seems to matter today to all of the social media platforms, as well as the search engines and the advertising companies is PPC. PPC tends to drive organic reach on social media. If you spend on social media advertising, you will also get better organic results. This has not been established but it is on everyone's mind. Does PPC also matter to Google? The answer is a resounding YES! So today, advertising is a big deal and is a great deal of what drives organic in search and on social media. (Unless you have a rabid following that will share your posts.)

So, what does matter?

Everything matters in the digital space…so while we can run digital tests that are hopefully soon forgotten if they fail, the other side of the coin is that anything left standing in place had better be quality content. Quality content touches all aspects of what we do and is ultimately the decider of how successful we will be in both the digital and analog world.

Now the question becomes, how do we create quality content that sets us apart from everyone else. That is a question for another day.