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If you think your website’s search visibility is founded on keywords and backlinks alone, then now’s the perfect time to reconsider what other elements might be at play – and where unrealized potential might lay.
Social media comments certainly sit in this category of overlooked but important resources for ramping up ranking efforts – and while it sounds a little outlandish, they really can make a difference if you know how to put them to work correctly.
So that’s enough bluster – let’s back up this claim with some cold, hard facts of the matter.
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Accelerating SEO Through Engagement
Engaged visitors to your site are active participants in perpetuating your brand’s story and catalyzing its growth. So when it comes to enhancing SEO, tapping into the collective intelligence and enthusiasm of your audience through social media comments is a no-brainer.
Here’s how it’s done:
The Ripple Effect Of Comments
Each comment on your social media creates ripples that extend your content’s reach, and more engagement signals can lead to increased visibility on social platforms themselves, which indirectly influences SEO by elevating brand awareness and driving traffic.
This aligns with some of the creative recruitment ideas that are available to businesses in the social media era. Getting stuck into the conversation and fielding questions on third-party platforms raises awareness of organizations among prospective employees, and makes it less of a challenge to attract talent when the time comes. So there’s a dual purpose to working with comments consistently.
Fresh Content For Crawlers
Search engines love fresh content, and comments contribute to this freshness, signaling to search crawlers that there’s ongoing activity and current interest on the page – both of which are factors that might boost the ranking potential.
Of course, Google is a fickle beast, and larger sites might find that new content doesn’t ever get indexed – with some studies suggesting this could apply to as much as 16% of pages which nevertheless have inherent value to search users.
For up-and-coming sites looking to compete and hopefully encounter this nice-to-have problem further down the line, social media comments are worth exploiting.
Long-Tail Keyword Goldmine
In the casual language of social commentary, users often inadvertently drop long-tail keywords – those specific phrases that you might not have predicted but are nevertheless invaluable for organic search. Capitalizing on these can refine your keyword strategy significantly – and since almost 92% of searches make use of long-tail terms, there’s a huge swath of options to explore if you know where to look.
Organic Reputation-Building
89% of consumers read online reviews to make purchasing decisions, according to Trustpilot, with the average consumer reading 10 reviews before feeling able to trust a business. Social media serves as a place for people to discuss their experiences with the companies they rely on – and this makes it a good way to organically generate positive feedback, which in turn leads more people to visit your website, thus bolstering its search visibility.
The Art Of Comment Optimization
To turn social media comments into SEO fuel, it’s crucial to engage in and encourage conversations that are as organic as they are strategic.
Here are some steps to achieve this:
Prompting Proactive Participation
Ask open-ended questions within your content that invite opinions or experiences. This tactic not only stimulates discussion but also increases the odds of valuable keyword insertions by your audience.
Conjuring A Responsive Rapport
Jumping into the conversation shows you’re attentive and value user input. Plus, responding promptly can foster a longer thread – which in turn creates more substance for search engines to digest.
Spotlighting Quality Contributions
Not all comments are created equal, so highlighting insightful ones can spark further quality engagement and motivate others to contribute meaningfully.
With the knowledge that 53% of marketers say blog content creation is their top inbound marketing priority, integrating social media commentary into this equation supplements these efforts by expanding the lifecycle and visibility of each piece of content created.
The Last Word
Obviously, it’s not possible to only focus on social media comments as a means of upping your SEO game, but the point is not to pivot away from the other strategies you’re using, but instead combine this new one alongside them to reap the benefits in due course.
Most importantly, remain patient when implementing this approach, because like all good SEO tactics, it will not give you quick wins, but rather build momentum over time, and pay off down the line in a major way.
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