Social media channels such as LinkedIn can positively impact your website’s SEO performance and boost your Google search rank, yet many recruiters silo SEO and LinkedIn or other social media marketing instead of seeing them as two parts of the same holistic ecosystem. Your LinkedIn page can be a valuable ally to your overall SEO. Here are five ways the two should work together to maximize your organic search efforts.

Create Link Opportunities

The number one opportunity on this list is also the hardest to achieve because you rely on LinkedIn to promote your content and make people aware that it’s out there. So many times, you take hours to research and produce amazing content only for it to show up in a small percentage of news feeds.

Countless times, we’ve stumbled upon a piece of content on social media that made an impression on a member of our team. It might be saved for later use, often in the form of a citation or quote linked to another post. Though a link on LinkedIn isn’t equivalent to a backlink on another site, that shared link on LinkedIn did make followers aware of the content’s existence so it could be referenced on our website.

It’s this passive way of creating link opportunities that can be difficult to achieve while still promoting your content.

Increase Brand Awareness and Positive Mentions

Google’s Search Quality Raters Guideline document shows human raters do factor brand mentions into the equation when considering a website’s reliability. That doesn’t mean their algorithm does, but as we all know, these guidelines are representative of what Google matters to Google.

This is where LinkedIn can play a major role in the overall perception of your brand. Firms with a strong LinkedIn presence that respond directly to their connections using the platform see a noticeable increase in overall satisfaction.

This affects the sentimentality of brand mentions as a whole, including client or candidate reviews and public forums. You want people to be talking about good experiences with your firm, not bad ones. Google pays attention to the context of your online engagement and how people talk about you, which then impacts what you rank for.

Notice that we said what you rank for, not how high you rank. Google uses online mentions to categorize you as relevant (or irrelevant) for search queries, depending on a variety of factors. You want to keep your brand mentions positive, and LinkedIn is a solid tool to help you do that.

Build Partnerships

Although, we all should still systematically share content on LinkedIn in a tried-and-true fashion, try shifting more time toward building relationships on the platform that are likely to lead to potential partnerships. The unfortunate truth is that it’s becoming more and more difficult to reach your audience organically on LinkedIn and other social media platforms.

But these platforms were originally designed to connect people and foster relationships, and they still excel at that function. There are three relationship-building levels you should be focusing on:

• Brand advocates: Active LinkedIn fans who are loyal to your brand and promote you for free, multiplying your effectiveness without costing an extra penny. Think about past clients or candidates who would speak highly of your firm, as well as your own team members.
• Organic influencers: Unlike paid influencers, there are LinkedIn accounts with genuine expertise, authority and trustworthiness in the industry. Any positive endorsements of your brand or services from them carry a lot of weight with their engaged audiences. Think about other non-competitive brands within your industry or niche that would speak to your firm.
• Strategic partners: Non-competitive business or influencers within your niche who are willing to partner up and co-create valuable content that taps into both of your audiences for crossover marketing opportunities. Think about certain recruiting software you use or an industry expert who would benefit equally from the partnership.

Establish Authority

Social media, content marketing and SEO go hand-in-hand. One of the top benefits of content marketing is that if you’re consistently publishing high-quality content, you will establish yourself as an industry expert within your niche over time. 

People come to trust the information you provide, and that trust starts to encompass your brand as a whole. This is great news because Google’s evaluation of your website’s authority and trustworthiness plays a huge factor in your search ranking success.

Take that and add LinkedIn to the mix as a megaphone to push your authoritative content out into another channel and broaden your overall reach, brand awareness and discoverability. It’s a recipe for success.

People aren’t just on one website all day long; they access a variety of digital resources every day, which is why omnichannel marketing is such an effective technique to reach consumers no matter where they are. Even if LinkedIn follower totals aren’t part of Google’s formula, you’re still reaching a wide audience and winning their trust.

Boost Content Lifespan and Engagement

We touched on this strategy in the beginning when discussing link opportunities. You might be writing and publishing amazing content, but if people aren’t finding it, you’re not getting the traffic and backlinks you should be. Sharing your content on LinkedIn can help people discover your content and brand, but it also gives the content a longer lifecycle as it’s shared and circulated. 

The first trick here is to make sure your content is engaging. If it’s not, it doesn’t matter what you do–people aren’t going to be interested. Engaging content needs to connect with its audience and serve a purpose. All content should do at least one of the following:

• Present a solution to a problem
• Educate someone on a topic of interest
• Entertain a person in some way
• Connect with someone on an emotional level

But how do you know if your content is entertaining? Start paying attention! Look at your recent month’s content and see what gets the most reactions. Does it spark discussions? Are people sharing it? Are they tagging their friends?

Or does your content sit there amongst the sound of crickets?

There are backend analytics for your LinkedIn page as well as third-party resources to help you identify which topics and types of content are connecting. If you’ve ticked that first box of having engaging content, then your LinkedIn strategy needs to kick in to help push that content out in front of your audience. The more relevant content, the better your chances of getting likes, comments, shares and tags that will keep the momentum going.

You can also make this happen by taking proactive measures such as tagging industry experts and business partners, choosing the right hashtags, and hosting contests and giveaways to reward people for their engagement and other techniques.

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LinkedIn and recruiting go together like peanut butter and jelly, but so do LinkedIn and SEO. Don’t leave money on the table because you didn’t optimize your content through this platform. Recruiters Websites is here to make sure your website and LinkedIn SEO is top-notch, and we can’t wait to walk you through it. Let’s chat!