Social climbing: six steps to elevate your SEO

When igaming brands talk about SEO, usually they are referring to ranking for keywords on Google and driving traffic to their platform via organic search. And of course the work that drives this strategy, from content creation to technical SEO and optimised creative.

But are affiliates missing a trick when it comes to using social media to bolster their SEO strategy? The lines between social media and SEO are becoming increasingly blurred and smart affiliates are understanding that they need to take a more holistic approach and harness the power of social channels, as well as traditional SEO methods, to produce the results they need to make their brand stand out in the highly competitive SERPs.

How does social media impact SEO?

Before we get into what you can do to use social media to boost your SEO presence, let’s discuss how social media can impact your SEO strategy overall. The correlation between search engines and social media is incredibly high. Whilst it can be argued that there isn’t a direct link to search engine rankings, a strong social media presence will improve your brand recognition and authority, as well as increase your content lifespan as it will forever be on a timeline. This alone, will positively impact your SEO results as a by-product.

Social support: six steps to bolster your SEO

Here are some actions that affiliates can take to ensure their social media plan is considering and incorporating SEO for a fully comprehensive strategy:

1. Create an integrated keyword strategy. As we noted the lines are blurring between social and SEO strategy, which is why you need to try and ensure the keyword strategy you apply to your website is carried over to your social media channels wherever possible. You can use third party tools and analytics to research which keywords are performing best on specific platforms and use that to tailor your optimisation. Just like onsite content, be sure not to overload your posts with too many keywords.
2. Include links in social profiles wherever possible. The end goal for any affiliate is a conversion, and for that there needs to be a link click somewhere along the way. As such, ensure you include links within your social media content, however it’s critical it doesn’t look like spam. You can be clever in how you incorporate them too. For instance, it can be more difficult to link from Instagram. This is where you’d look to utilise other tools and functionality other than feed posts to send traffic. You can use the highlights section for example to highlight top deals, player favourites, top tips etc.
3. Link to news pieces, betting guides or promotional guides within the stories section. Social media channels are constantly evolving, so you can be inventive in how you link out. Similarly to how you would track your affiliate marketing campaigns, make sure you do the same here so you can really evaluate the effectiveness.
4. Create CTAs within your video content. Integrating links within video content is also a great way to drive social media traffic to your site, helping bolster your SEO. The form of content that has seen the biggest increase in ROI has been short-form video content, with 36% of users interacting and engaging with this format. If you can embed a link directly into a video, that’s the best way to provoke a reaction. Not all social media outlets allow you to do this, if not, placing in the text of the post will be the best option. 
5. Optimise your social media channels. It should go without saying but it doesn’t always happen with affiliates who are in charge of social media. It’s critical you have a solid SEO base to go from when you are building out your ongoing strategy. Think of the level of work that goes into auditing your website - the same should go into creating and maintaining social media channels. Remember, people often use these as alternative search tools to Google, Bing, Yahoo etc., so think of them as mini search engines themselves.
   
   When you are creating or updating your social media profiles, wherever there is a content requirement, ensure you pay the same attention to creating rewarding copy for these channels as you would for your website. Particularly when the content can tend to slightly longer-form such as the ‘about’ section. Bear in mind however, only the first 140 characters will show up on search, so lead with what’s important. Verifying your social media pages will also improve search visibility on those native platforms and confirm that you are an authentic brand as opposed to a fake account or spammer. 
6. Use social to build links and relationships. Building your brand on social media will in turn give you additional reach with players, influencers, creators and brands within your niche. By crafting quality content that is valuable or engaging in some way will then be shared. It could then in turn into referral links improving your SEO performance.
   
   Don’t be afraid to contribute to other brands’ content either - it’s exactly how you build relationships and start to share one another's community. It’s called “social” media for exactly that reason. Building that community is what will resonate with your users.

For affiliates who are trying to build and improve their SEO frameworks, social media should absolutely be part of that conversation and be an integrated part of a holistic strategy.

Photo by Wesley Pribadi on Unsplash