Combining Social Media Marketing with SEO

In today’s society SEO and Social Media Marketing have become extremely important for organizations to take part in. Due to this, it is only logical that organizations are starting to talk and think of ways to align these two. Back in 2013, Eric Schemidt, Google chairman, stated that, “within search results, information tied to verify online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification… The true cost of remaining anonymous might be irrelevance.” Recently, Google actually decided to remove Authorship tags. However, they believe that this isn't really what matters. This is only changing the strategy not the actual algorithm. 

The majority of the larger brands have come to the realization that they need both of these marketing services, and they have come to create cross functioning teams that are strictly designed to deploy this alignment objective. However for small to medium businesses, this alignment can be complicated. Often times these businesses actually outsource for these types of services. Therefore, it can be a small challenge for them to make a profit by aligning these services. Below are a few suggestions and ideas on how to help organizations align SEO and Social Media Marketing more easily.

What Are The Best Ways To Get These Companies On The Same Page?

Just like most other things, there is a strategic alignment process that has been created in order to help these small and medium businesses to effectively align these marketing teams.

1. Leadership – The first thing that is important is starting with a different type of leadership approach. This leadership approach requires having a shared Center of Excellence, and this allows the different marketing teams to overlap with each other.
2. Agile Management – When scheduling sprints, it is important to deploy an agile management that can create marketing tracts that support each other.
3. Specialists – When hiring specialists for a company, it is imperative that they know and understand the shared impacts of both SEO and SMM.
4. Key Performance Indicators – The next most important thing when setting up this type of strategy is to establish KPIs. KPIs can sometimes not be apparent, and having shared KPIs can be difficult to do when trying to focus on a common enterprise-wide objective.
5. Training – It is important to train marketing staff for cross-functionality.
6. Sharing – Dashboards and analytics are important to share to make them work.
7. Synergizing Integrated Strengths – When working on this step, there are two questions that are important to ask. Out of your team members, who best works well together? Who has the best aligned perspective about your business’s enterprise?
8. Unified Goals – Finally, you need to direct your SEO and SMM marketing alignment towards a unified goal.

After you have figured out all of these objectives, you can start hiring or promoting the best candidates that can effectively deploy this vision.

Hiring of Hybrid Specialists

When you are hiring people to run your marketing team, it is a good idea to always hire those that understand SEO and SMM, and more importantly, they should understand the synergy between the two. Below are a few things that you should look for when picking the ideal candidate.

1. SEO specialists should be able to tag site pages.
2. Keyword specialists are imperative, especially the ones who know how to run social conversations.
3. The specialists that you hire should be data-oriented and tech savvy. These specialists are considered to be a new breed of digital marketers.

After you have chosen the right people to execute your strategy, you need to look at the two disciplines and where they intersect.

Overlap in SEO and SMM

Quality content can be supported by both SEO and SMM. If your company doesn't distribute quality shares, videos and comments, the likelihood of not achieving your goals is increased. When it comes to the SEO side, keyword relevance is extremely important. Linking SEO and SMM specialists is an effective way to market your business, and although it can be difficult to execute, the benefits of doing so can outweigh the lengthy process of getting it just right. After all of this, you can have your specialists come up with an effective keyword management program. This is the final step to effectively linking these two marketing techniques effectively.