Video: 4 Ways Social Listening Can Boost SEO

Social listening describes the process of scanning online platforms to find the sentiment around your brand. Here are 4 ways that social listening can boost SEO.

Highlights:

Social listening describes the process of scanning social media platforms, blogs, news websites and other digital forums to find the mention of any keywords.
Regularly monitoring the sentiment around your brand through social listening can help prevent a problem before it blows up.
Track your organic brand mentions and use that information to create a strategy about how to grow brand awareness.

Video transcript:

This is Elizabeth Hines. I’m the Creative Director at Fronetics, and today we’re talking about four ways social listening can boost your SEO.

Social listening describes the process of scanning social media platforms, blogs, news websites and other digital forums to find the mention of any keywords. In particular the name of your company or your CEO for example, to figure out the general sentiment around your company and your people. We used to use social listening mainly for social media marketing, but it can also be a really effective search engine optimization tool if you do it properly. So here are four ways social listening can boost your SEO.

1. Learn if your backlinks are coming from spammy websites

Backlinks from spammy or untrustworthy websites can negatively impact your search ranking. So a Google executive recently noted that this is just a normal part of being on the web and really you shouldn’t worry that much about it. But the one exception would be if there’s some kind of dedicated activity from a competitor, for example, buying up a lot of links and trying to ruin your search ranking. In this instance you should consider disavowing them and using social listening to figure that out.

2. Find guest blogging opportunities

One of the greatest benefits of social media is the opportunity to network with your industry peers and social influencers. Building relationships with reputable businesses and people could be a gateway to guest blogging, which is one of the most sound and effective ways to build your reputation with search engines, not to mention the people that follow those peer sites and influencers.

3. Monitor your brands reputation

Mistakes happen and even companies with the best intentions will sometimes suffer from a social media crisis. So regularly monitoring the sentiment around your brand through social listening can help prevent a problem before it blows up, goes viral or at least is big enough for Google’s algorithm to down rank you for providing a poor user experience.

4. Grow brand mentions

Now a lot of people will tell you to use social listening to find linkless backlinks, which are websites that mention your content but don’t provide a hyperlink to your site. Then you should reach out to those people and see if they’ll add that link in. But in my opinion, this is an enormous waste of time. We’re seeing that linkless backlinks are becoming equally as important as regular backlinks for search engine optimization. So instead, I encourage you to use that time and energy to track your organic brand mentions and use that information to create a strategy about how to grow more. For example did you say something on Reddit that got lots of attention? Well, you should do more of that.

For more tips like these, check out our blog at fronetics.com.