We live in a day and age where if we have a question, all we have to do is simply look it up on Google and—bam! Links upon links of information appear before you. You don’t even have to type an entire phrase. Google’s algorithms detect certain keywords that will trigger specific results based on its relevance. For example, entering keywords “pet” and “groomers” would likely give you a list of links for pet grooming business or even blogs on pet grooming tips. As a business owner, you want yours to be one of the first to pop-up in the search results when the keywords are entered. But how do you do this? How do you get your business to be seen first by Google? To do so takes a specific type of marketing called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
SEO for Beginners
When you finally decide to take that leap to becoming more proactive about your marketing strategy, you will quickly learn you need to improve your SEO. No matter the service or product, if you are promoting online, at some point you are going to need to become familiar with that term. Including SEO into your marketing strategy means you will need to incorporate keywords into your website content as well as add keyword tags to the HTML pages of your website. This allows Google to see your relevance to a particular keyword by assessing how often the word appears in both the content of the site and on the HTML pages.
Many of you may not want to be an SEO expert, and fortunately, you don’t have to! There are many ways to help your SEO, such as Google Analytics™, which walks you through how to improve your website’s SEO with user friendly instructions. You also have the option of hiring a skilled copywriter to write SEO into your content.
If this concept is new to you, you might feel that you haven’t done anything to improve your SEO and may even be wondering where to begin. However, if you have social media accounts that you post on regularly while effectively using hashtags, then I’d say you’re off to a great start!
Google Popularity Through Social Media
Social media has increasingly become a priority marketing tool that can help promote brand awareness, foster relationships with clients, increase website traffic, and so much more! Many people think that to capitalize on those benefits, you need to put all your focus on obtaining a large following base. One of the main strategic actions taken to increase followers, is by posting regularly to maintain visibility. This helps you maintain a steady increase in followers as long as you are consistent, but that’s not all.
Posting regularly on a public page on social media in combination with effective hashtag usage and likes can give you and your social media pages high rankings on Google for all types of search results. You must make sure the name of your social media page (which is different from the username) matches the name of your brand or the name you want your potential customers searching.
Effective Hashtag Habits and Avoiding Overkill
Simply by using hashtags, you can gain visibility on Google without having a significant following base or a website. I was able to become searchable on Google before I even launched my website and with only 40 followers! I did this by effectively hashtagging keywords on my posts.
On Twitter and Instagram, hashtags have now become pages of their own that people can follow. Users can now follow specific hashtags, showing them all the content posted pertaining to that keyword. That is where you want your content to pop-up. By hashtagging keywords, not only does your content appear on the hashtag page, it also appears on Google when people search that keyword.
Hashtags have gotten somewhat of a bad rap over the years before people truly understood how to use them. People have abused them by using random hashtags that were trending just to be seen regardless if its relevant to their content. I’m not saying turn every word you can think of that pertains to your brand into a hashtag. I would suggest picking 5 good hashtags that pertain to your brand, your “go-to” hashtags, that can be added to your posts. Adding those hashtags can give your content more reach which opens you up for more likes. Remember, it’s a combination of hashtags and likes that gets your social media content found on Google. Not to mention, increasing your reach by using hashtags can increase your social media following!
If you need help with content or managing your social media consistency, LB Composition offers services to meet those needs, learn more.
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