Many business owners believe social media and SEO are two separate forms of marketing that don’t quite work together. Actually, the opposite is true. You can enhance the success of your search engine optimization strategies with social media, which can also draw in potential customers on its own as well.

By including links to your social media profiles on your website, your SEO works double duty. It gets visitors to your website, and lets them click to follow you where you can continue marketing and building a relationship with them to convert them into customers and then into repeat customers for life. This post looks at a few strategies that will leverage your efforts on both sectors.

Update Frequently

While you don’t want to update your Twitter profile hourly, it’s important to update frequently. Updating at least once a day is a good rule to follow. For example, picture the negative impression of a Facebook page that hasn’t been updated in eight months makes on a potential customer – not a good one.

After all, if you’re neglecting your social media accounts, a potential customer may think you’re neglecting other areas of your business. Don’t waste all of your SEO efforts getting visitors to your website and social networking profiles by letting them sit neglected.

Don’t Always Pitch

Social networking isn’t just about selling. It’s also about sharing. If you only put out pushy sales messages in your posts, you’ll likely gain more unsubscribes than sales. Your audience wants to connect with you, and that will never happen if you’re always pitching to them. Answer questions, reply to comments, link to relevant information and to your blog posts, share pictures of your office and employees, include posts about the causes your business supports, and start conversations about things relevant to your industry.

Don’t forget to include your SEO keywords in your posts when appropriate as well. If you make an effort to connect with your subscribers, all of the social media and SEO strategies you’ve implemented to get those subscribers will pay off big time.

Handle Negative Comments With Class

It’s inevitable that you’ll have a negative comment or two on your online presence, regardless of how well you run your business or how great your product or service is. It’s human nature that people like to complain, whether they’re just having a bad day or legitimately had a bad experience.

The important thing about negative comments isn’t the actual comment. It’s how you RESPOND to the comment that counts. Respond thoughtfully and helpfully, and always set out to remedy the problem to make the best impression on your subscribers.

After responding, you can always write a number of new posts to push the negative comment down where it isn’t seen, but never ignore it or it may come back to haunt you.

Start A Weekly Tradition

Starting a weekly tradition is a great way to get people to visit your website and social media profiles regularly. Whether it’s Monday and you post your “product of the week,” “Monday only specials,” or anything else, people will visit regularly to check out what’s going on if you start a tradition of announcing something weekly.

The key is keeping the day of the week consistent. Increase the effectiveness of this even further by only allowing people to buy (or whatever your tradition involves) within a certain time frame. For example, visit our Twitter page every Monday at 10AM for the link to purchase our Monday only special of the week – link only live for one hour!

Social media and SEO complement each other nicely. While SEO brings you visitors, social media gives you a unique opportunity for interacting with them. Want to learn more? Click to schedule a free, no-obligation consultation with Seattle SEO Consultant’s resident Seattle SEO expert, Chad Morgan.