An SEO Crash Course with Myrna
In today’s digital marketplace, a holistic approach is essential when promoting your brand online! What do I mean by this? Your social media strategy should work in tandem with all of your marketing strategies, but especially with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Over the past several years, there has been a ton of debate regarding SEO and whether it's dying or here to stay. SEO is not dying at all. It's just evolving as technology changes and new platforms emerge. And, now that social media platforms have become so key to a business’s' marketing strategy, optimizing your overall web presence is essential.
What is SEO?
SEO is the art of using techniques to drive organic traffic to your website in order to obtain a high ranking position on search engine results pages. Examples of search engines are Google, Bing, and Yahoo. I purposely use the word “art” because SEO is not an exact science and there is no one-size-fits-all method. In fact, major search engines like Google use about 200 factors to determine which websites get listed first and rank them according those factors! SEO Today Today, my companies Mezzohead Media and MyrnaDaramy.com use the term Digital Media Optimization (DMO) to describe what SEO has evolved into. DMO is the art used to drive traffic to your any of your digital properties in order to be more discoverable and rank higher on search engine results pages. Nowadays, prospective customers aren’t solely finding you through Google. They're discovering your brand on Instagram, Snapchat, and countless other touch points. As a result, your digital content and entire online portfolio must consist of a combination of three things in order to be optimized and more discoverable.
Here's breakdown:
DMO = Content + Relevancy + Frequency
Content: Having good, quality content means that you are speaking the same language as your target market by being creative and utilizing the keywords that they would use in order to connect with you.
Relevancy: Being relevant means that you are meeting your prospective customers where they are in order to build a relationship and establish trust. How do you meet customers where they are? You use the same language (or keywords) they use, you answer the questions they have, you show up where they are online.
Frequency: Frequency is all about how often your content is being clicked on. Search engines are keeping tabs of how frequently you create new digital content and whether or not it's getting referenced, shared, liked, re-grammed, commented on, and so on.
Since there are many online touch points, it's important to optimize your content across every channel since the primary goal is to be found. Always consider how to optimize content that you upload on line. Whether it's naming files properly or incorporating hashtags and keywords, consider how you can increase your brand’s visibility at all times, both on and off of your website. By making sure that your brand has a consistent presence across all channels, (i.e. same logo, same profile descriptions, same voice) visitors who connect with your brand are sent a clear message about who you are, what you do, and where you do it.
Sure, SEO is necessary. But it's no longer enough. Take it a step further and focus on DMO to help your brand thrive now and into the future.
How SEO Ties Into Your Social Media Strategy
Now that you have a baseline understanding of SEO (we’ll be covering this in much more detail in the fall), we wanted to help you understand how it ties into your social media as well as how you can start upping your game with a few simple strategies! Myrna talked about how your DMO consists of your content, its relevancy as well as the frequency it is engaged with. But, without your relevant and key-worded content being posted on the internet, there is little hope that anyone would engage with it. So, think of social media as the biggest tool you have to distribute your content – and, not just to a generic audience; rather, to your ideal client (hello hashtags!). Here is how we use social media to distribute Aisle Planner’s content and practice DMO on a daily basis:
- We share the url from a recently published article on Facebook that includes a caption with a clear CTA to click through
- We post an image(s) on Instagram about the article with a caption that includes a clear CTA to click the link in our profile. We add the link to our linkin.bio through the Later app we use for social media scheduling. We also use a handful of relevant hashtags for each post (We do not copy and paste the same ones every day because the people we want to reach is different for each post)
- We share an Instagram Story that directs people to the link in our profile
- We create a branded pin to post on Pinterest that includes a key-worded description and links back to the article url
After we have posted everything, we switch over to our personal social media accounts and start engaging with what we just shared. Remember, engagement is a big part of the algorithms these days, so it helps to kick-start it yourself!
So remember, every time you share something on social media be sure to do these simple things to help it build your SEO:
- Geo-tag your location when appropriate
- Use hashtags that are relevant to your ideal audience and keyword strategy
- Use your keywords in your captions when appropriate
- Link back to your website when you can
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