Practically everyone is on social media.
That includes website administrators who can link to your site content, influencers who can vouch for and promote this content, and users who make known their content preferences online.
💡 Read Social Listening Guide: Proven Hacks, Strategies, and Tools
That means social media can help you boost your backlink profile, something the Google algorithm considers when ranking website content. It can also help you create site content that people are likely to consume and promote it. Google has said that its automated ranking systems are also designed to present content that’s helpful and reliable to users.
But how do you find these website administrators and influencers and determine your audience’s content preferences in the first place? Enter social listening.
Social listening is the practice of monitoring and analyzing conversations on social media platforms. The dedicated social media tools can help marketers scour entire social channels and find direct mentions of their brand made by relevant personalities and customer feedback.
See how social listening and SEO can work hand in hand? Just to give you an even better idea, here are the five specific ways social listening can help you produce the best SEO results.
1. Social Listening Helps You Find Unlinked Mentions To Transform Into Valuable Backlinks
Link building is the process of acquiring backlinks from another website to yours. The goal is to increase the links to your webpage, thereby improving your rank on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Social monitoring helps you discover instances of people mentioning your brand or products on social media posts but haven’t included a link back to you.
For instance, with its real-time notifications through email, mobile, or Slack, a social media monitoring tool like Determ can tell you if someone promoted their blog post about your product on their social channel. If you see the blog post doesn’t link back to your site, you can easily reach out to the author for them to link back to it. Likely, they wouldn’t mind adding the link since they already mentioned your brand or product. It’s also an effective way to build relationships with strategic partners.
Remember, though, that link-building is all about quality, not quantity. A backlink from high-ranking or high-authority websites like the New York Times will do more for your SEO campaigns than a link from an up-and-coming influencer.
2. Social Listening Helps You Uncover Guest Blogging Opportunities
Whether you want to build trust with eCommerce customers or boost your manufacturing business online, content marketing strategies like blogging are a great way to address customers’ pain points while positioning your products as the solution.
Guest blogging, in particular, is also a tried-and-true SEO strategy. Not only do you create informative content that potential customers want and search engines prioritize, but you can also build backlinks to your website. When you publish articles on other websites, the host site usually includes links to your web pages within the content or author’s credit.
For instance, this Moz guest poster got links to their website and the company’s website.
Guest posting can also boost your SEO efforts by helping you improve your brand authority or credibility. One of the signals Google uses in its ranking algorithm is authoritativeness. It prioritizes content from expert and trustworthy sources.
Where does social listening come in here?
Similar to how social listening strategies help you find online conversations about your brand, they can also help you identify relevant websites to partner with for guest blogging opportunities.
For example, you can ask Determ to show you the authority site owners that have directly mentioned your brand. You can then send them a message to inquire about possible guest post opportunities.
You can also use social listening tools to identify and track guest post topics and content formats that generate buzz among your target audience.
Platforms like Determ have filters that allow you to localize keyword research by location or language, ensuring you use the best keywords for your audience in your guest posts. For companies with a global footprint like World Media Wire, localization allows them to monitor keywords in different languages. Using the right keywords in your guest posts ensures users find this content given a search topic.
Guest blogging does have its challenges. First, it requires consistent effort to create original and high-quality content. Second, getting featured on high-authority websites like news sites can be difficult if you’re not already an industry leader.
You have to start building authority with mid to low-authority publications. These websites may have a smaller following, but their audiences are usually more qualified and loyal. They are also more likely to publish your content.
Read 6 Ways to Come up with Content Ideas Using Determ
3. Social Listening Helps You Understand Your Audience’s Reactions To Competitors
Social listening enables you to learn what people are saying about your competitors. These actionable insights don’t just allow you to understand your position in the market. They also give you a competitive edge in SEO in several ways. After all, with social listening, you can identify audience sentiment analysis of your competitor’s content marketing efforts. You can, therefore, then determine ways to improve your own content or know what content to create for SEO.
For instance, if you see people on social platforms give negative comments about your competitor’s infographic–for instance, they say it’s wordy—you’d avoid what your competitor did and reduce the number of words in your own infographic copy. Or if you find that many social media users talk about your competitor’s blog post on email marketing tips promoted on its social channel, then you’d create a blog post on email marketing tips as well.
With this strategy, you don’t just increase your chances of boosting social media engagement for your infographic and blog content. You also increase your chances of authority websites linking to them on your site. The result overall is that you can enhance your SEO efforts.
Read PR SEO: 8 Genius Tips to Get More Coverage
To remain competitive, use Determ’s data analytics to understand your market position and build data-driven strategies around engagement, customer behavior, and brand sentiment.
4. Social Listening Helps You Track Inbound Links To Your Website
It’s beneficial to know where your inbound links are coming from. Why? Again, the quality of backlinks can hurt or help your rank on SERPs, so you want links from relevant and trustworthy websites.
Social listening allows you to see where you’re getting new links. With Determ’s powerful filters, for instance, you can streamline all social mentions in one feed, even if you weren’t tagged in the social media post.
Let’s say, in this feed, you find a shady gambling site mentioning you. You can easily check that site yourself. So, if the site linked to your website content, you can send the webmaster a message to refrain from linking to you.
5. Social Listening Helps You Find Influencers Who Can Promote Your Site Content
As we’ve seen, Google likes to rank sites with authority. Your website traffic tends to correlate with the number of backlinks you garner over time and, therefore, your authority. Also, the more traffic you have, the more people who might just stay on your site. Google pays close attention to dwell time, or how long people spend on a page when coming from a Google search.
But that’s the thing. For you to reap those SEO benefits above, you need to have people going to your site in the first place.
This is where promoting your site content comes in. Where better to promote your site content than on social media?
Social listening tools can help you find the right influencers who can do this promotion for you. Why leverage influencers instead of promoting your site content yourself? Because influencers hold a lot of sway over their thousands if not millions of followers. A staggering 62% of social media users trust influencer recommendations. So, if a relevant influencer promotes your site content on social media, thousands if not millions of people–including website administrators who can give you a backlink and users who just want to be informed— are likely to go to your website.
With Determ, you can find influencers who mention your brand, your competitor, or your niche. These are influencers who likely won’t mind promoting your site content since it’s safe to assume it aligns with the topics they touch on.
With Determ’s several dashboards that list influencers on social media, you can see who mentioned your brand in the last three months. You can also look at each influencer’s reach. This data helps you determine the influencer who can promote your site content to as many relevant users as possible.
Read 5 Ways to Get the Most Out of an Influencer Partnership on Social Media
In Closing
Social media listening tools can help you enhance your SEO campaigns. While social media marketers use social listening as a primary tool for reputation management, it has other applications for boosting your SEO efforts.
Social listening tools can help you find unlinked mentions and transform them into valuable backlinks. They can also help you uncover guest blogging opportunities, understand your audience’s reactions to your competitor’s own content so you can improve yours, and track inbound links to your site so you can remove links that can harm your SEO. At the same time, social media listening tools can help you find influencers who can promote your site content to interested users, including website owners who can link to it.
Social listening and SEO can work together to deliver exceptional results. Don’t miss out and use that to your advantage.
If you want to find out how social listening can assist your SEO campaigns, contact us and book a demo, and our team will assist you!
With decades of experience in B2B web design, Ian Loew is Lform’s Owner, Creative Director, and Head of Business Development, which he founded in 2006. Ian has worked with a diverse range of clients, including small startups and large corporations. He takes great pride in truly understanding and translating what clients want into actionable results. Lform’s philosophy is rooted in the belief that working with clients is about creating partnerships, and their success leads to Lform’s gain. Ian’s lifelong passions include mountain biking and skiing, and he especially enjoys spending time with his family.
