Social media is one of the key channels for promoting products in your business online. There are many e-commerce businesses investing a lot into this particular channel, forgetting that the path to conversion is a bit more complicated. It is not about just being there and putting up some ads to reach your target audience.

There are many links and correlations between SEO and social media. Social media provides awareness that can help you to get useful backlinks, engagement, and also is a great source of referral traffic which helps the website organically rank higher among search results. But this is not the only way these two channels influence each other.

Using both SEO and social media is important when planning to promote or already promoting products, services, brands or just sharing the message with the audience. Thinking about user behavior, we need to keep in mind two basic facts:

• Almost nobody will remember your message, brand name, product, services or anything you are trying to promote via social media marketing at the first sight.
• People usually don’t buy after the first visit to your website.

SEO, Brand, and Social Media Marketing Impact

First, you’ll have to understand that potential customers won’t dedicate more than few seconds to your ad broadcasted on social media. What this means is that they won’t remember almost anything, unless it is somehow extraordinary. How do get through this? You’ll have to produce 10-times the content or target this ad to each person at least a few times. A common person usually needs to see your ad or product three to five times to recognize and remember it. Not more, else you’ll risk being annoying.

After the ads, some of your customers probably know about your product but they don’t seem to have the time or intent to buy from you at the moment. However, this need might come sometime in the future and your business has to be ready. One day, one of them decide to buy this product and they will not go back again through your ad. They will type your product or your brand name directly into Google where they’ll have many more options where they can buy this product, not just in your shop.

Let’s say I’ve seen an ad for a Samsung mobile phone two months ago for a few times and I know they’ve got a new version of Samsung S7. It’s cool and maybe I could buy it. I’ve only had good experience with the brand, after all. Well, I don’t have time now because I’m leaving to Thailand for a month. When I come back, though, I’ll need a new phone. Once the time comes, I’ll just search Google for ‘Samsung s7 price’.

Do you see where I’m going with this? Your customers sometimes don’t buy things immediately. Usually, it takes them time to finish the purchase. Even if you are working on social media awareness, you need to have your SEO under control to convert them as a customer. What happens when they don’t see you? They will simply buy from a different store and you loose potential customers just because they can’t find you on Google.

Focus on Channels, Top Topics, and Keywords

Main sources for traffic these days are social media, organic traffic, and referrals if you are talking about B2B or e-commerce. When planning a promotion, you need to take into account all of the channels through which users can finish the conversion. This can be easily done by being registered in price comparators, using landing pages, retargeting via social media, paid search, and being on top of keywords and topics through organic search. These include a lot of important search opportunities that your future customer will look for online.

For example, when you plan to promote your product via social media, just check if you are performing well with your top product keywords. If I am selling baby trikes, these should be keywords that my customers are likely to search for, such as ‘trikes’, ‘baby trikes’, ‘trike’, ‘trike for baby’, ‘trike for 6-month-old baby’, ‘trikes from 6 months’ and similar. Your customers may also look for other related topics based on their intent, interests, and other things. To cover all of this, we need to think on a bigger scale. Here are the few examples of product and non-product topics.

Questions or topics related to parents and parenting

• Which trike brand is safe?
• Which trike is the best for a child of 10 months?
• Outdoor activities for babies.
• Which food is good for a baby?

As we can see, there can be many other topics that are interesting for your target group. Covering them in a blog section of your website is a perfect solution for that. You might get very valuable organic traffic.

Conclusion

If you are doing or planning to do social media marketing activities that can deliver a high amount of traffic to your website, do not count only on social media alone. You’ll have to think as your potential customer and plan multi-channel marketing, do retargeting campaigns, and give special attention to your website’s SEO.

Not everyone will remember your brand, message, product or service upon first glance. You’ll need to rank for important brand keywords, top product keyword, and topics related to your business in search engines.