Why Do SEO & Social Media Work Better Together? Here’s Why with Mark & Eric

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In this episode of Here’s Why, Mark & Eric discuss the benefits of SEO and Social Media working together. Search and social fall under the umbrella of digital marketing and should not be kept in separate silos. But too often, in larger organizations in particular, they each work by their own agenda.

In this four minute video Eric not only explains why there are tremendous benefits to fostering collaboration between your SEO and social media teams, he uncovers how to get them wanting to work together!

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Full Transcript:

Mark: Welcome to another episode of Here’s Why with Mark and Eric.

Eric: So Mark, I have a question for you. Why is there incredible power related to content and someone’s personable brand?

Eric: Welcome to another episode of Here’s Why with Mark and Eric.

Mark: So Eric, what does a company gain by getting Social Media and SEO working together?

Eric: The short answer is: they gain leverage. But let me explain. First thing you have to do is, you have to create great content. If you create great content, let’s say for example you publish it on your own blog, then the content would be good enough at that point that the social media team will want to share it.

This will help them develop new followers and engagement with their social media stream, which is good for a social media presence. That’s the first part. The second part is if you’ve built a solid social media presence, the sharing of the content will gain exposure for that content, which might end up driving links back to the content and then Social Media and SEO will both benefit.

Mark: If there’s obvious benefits to this, why does it break down?

Eric: It breaks down in three different ways. One is, the SEO team sometimes creates poor content. Unfortunately, that is history for the SEO industry and a reason why there is a divide between SEO and Social Media. But as I said at the beginning, we have to get past that. You have to create great content, you can’t be in the poor content business anymore.

The other thing that can happen, is the content might not be relevant to the overall marketing plan, causing the system to break down. The final thing is the goals can be misaligned. The Social Media team might have goals that make them feel uncomfortable with allocating some of their social stream bandwidth to sharing posts from the SEO team.

Mark: If your business is in that situation, what can you do to change it?

Eric: It’s not that easy because sometimes it happens because of misaligned perceptions and expectations of what both teams are trying to accomplish. What you need to do, especially if you’re on the SEO side, is to get to a point where you understand what the Social Media team is trying to accomplish.

Then you need to frame your campaigns in a way that helps them meet their goals. Once you’ve done that, you get into a situation where you can brainstorm the content that youre going to create from the SEO side. The Social Media team can participate in that brainstorming and that gets them engaged with and excited about the content that’s going to be produced.

It gets a little more complicated if the content is not going on your site and you’re doing a guest post somewhere. That’s where it gets a little more subtle because you have to get into really selling their goals. For example, if the goal is we need to get more engagement in our social media stream, you can do that with great content. If you need to get more visitors to the site then you need to sell that you are able to grow the audience. Those are some of the things you have to try to do.

Mark: Those are some great tips Eric. Do you have any final advice for businesses that are struggling with this?

Eric: I think the main thing is you have to learn how to sell your plan. One way people fall down is when they know what they’re trying to accomplish, but the explanations or sales process takes a half hour or an hour. I like to say “You have 5 Slides and 5 Minutes”, if you can make the sale in that time, you’re in good shape. If it takes longer, you’re probably losing their attention.

Mark: Terrific. Thanks for that great advice Eric. If you’d like to review this or learn more about this, Eric’s written a great post about this on Forbes. Thanks for joining us for another episode of Here’s Why with Mark and Eric.

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Eric Enge
Eric Enge is a partner at Stone Temple Consulting (STC), which has been providing SEO Consulting services for over 5 years. STC has worked with a wide range of clients, ranging from small silicon valley start-ups, to Fortune 25 companies. Eric is also co-author of The Art of SEO book.

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