5 Ways a Social CRM Can Boost Your SEO

By now, you know all about how vital a social CRM is to the sales process, right? It helps you identify leads, provide customers with the best possible brand experience, and turn regular customers into brand ambassadors.

But did you know that a social CRM can also elevate your brand’s search engine optimization? The data you glean from a social CRM can help you communicate online with potential and current customers in a more interactive and dynamic way, and their engagement with your brand in turn gives your SEO a major boost. Stronger SEO means more leads finding you, traveling along the buyer’s journey, and becoming happy, loyal customers. And we all want that. So here are five ways to make your social CRM work for your SEO.  

  1. Understanding your clients and ideal clients’ social behavior helps you create better content. 

In days gone by, marketers were forced to imagine the behaviors of their ideal clients. But a social CRM that tracks clients’ and prospective clients’ digital footprints takes the guesswork out of the process by giving you a more complete view of their preferences and behavior. What channels are they using? What groups do they belong to? What articles are they clicking, sharing, and linking to? Which influencers do they follow? And what keywords are they searching?

Knowing and understanding the content your target audience is searching for, consuming, and sharing, should directly inform the type of content you create. It’s also key to developing a Know-Like-Trust website that converts as much traffic as possible.  Address and incorporate their search terms so your content gets found. Identify their paint points and figure out how to alleviate them. Emulate the styles of content they like to read. And make sure to be using the channels they are on.

  1. Knowing who is most popular among your clients and ideal clients lets you identify guest blog posting opportunities.

One of the most efficient ways to increase your exposure is to create mutually beneficial relationships with bloggers who have already a built an online community. They can guest post on your blog and/or you can post on theirs. You’ll get your content in front of a whole new network of potential customers, and the best part is that it’s a win-win-win proposition: bloggers are often looking for more content or new places to write, you get the benefit of their audience, and the readers get new content in which they’re interested. But you need to select bloggers carefully. Luckily, a social CRM makes it clear whom to target.  

A social CRM tracks your customers’ social influence, and it can tell you who is talking about you on social media and who’s following your profiles. Using these insights makes it easy to find the people with audiences on different platforms that are perfect for your needs. And once you do post, don’t forget to interact with the readers in the comments section!

  1. Knowing which channels your clients and ideal clients are using tells you where to publish your content.  

If a company tweets and no one reads it, does it make a sound? Original, valuable content takes time and resources to create. You want to make sure it gets seen by the people who will value it most. A strong social CRM can tell you whether it’s worth posting on LinkedIn or if none of your potential clients are engaged with that platform. It can tell you if you have a following on Snapchat that you weren’t even aware of it and whether Twitter is best for engaging with leads or brand advocates or both.  

A social CRM also can tell you which keywords your target audience is searching and on which channel. This can help you not only figure out what content to create, but where to publish it. Posting exactly the right content in exactly the right place will not only increase your SEO as you consistently get found, but it will help establish you as a trusted authority.

  1. Engaging your audiences online can send positive social signals that Google’s algorithm values.

Google aims to list the sites that are most valuable to users in its search results. Although Google hasn’t come right out and said it, it seems clear from user experience that its algorithm uses social signals as a proxy indicator of a brand’s value.

These social signals can include the size of your communities on Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and other platforms. They can also include share and like ratios, and how many genuine fans and followers you have. So the more you interact with your customers online, the better brand experience you can offer them, the more they’ll talk about you and engage with your content, and the better for your SEO.  

  1. Expanding your online social network to include the right prospects will help naturally attract high quality links.

As we just alluded to, one of the first casualties of Google’s algorithm update was sites whose SEO was boosted by spammy links. If your link building doesn’t seem organic and authentic, Google’s bots will catch on and penalize you. The best way to engage in natural linkbuilding is to expand your social network and reach out to your leads, your customers, and your brand advocates in ways that they want and are looking for. By knowing where each of these groups are spending time online and why, and meeting those needs, you will naturally get high quality, relevant SEO links which will not be penalized by Google. Not to mention, expanding your social network with your clients can help you with reputation management and getting Google reviews.

Therefore:

A social CRM is not just an indispensable method for attracting leads and moving them along the pipeline to a sale. The rich data it provides also ensures you create the right kind of content and connect with your customers, and potential customers, where they are already searching. Clicking on your site, engaging with your brand in interactive platforms, sharing your materials and sending you links all add valuable SEO juice to your brand. And stronger SEO helps do your marketing for you.