How to Use Social Listening for Better SEO

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Search engine optimization has come a long way since its inception. Gone are the days when it just revolved around keywords. Thanks to Google, website owners have to put in a lot of work in multiple dimensions to rank well today.
Do you think that social media and SEO are entirely different marketing tactics?
If you answered yes, this post is for you.

• Most website owners fail to link social media in their search engine optimization strategy.
• In this process, they create a massive gap in their marketing efforts. This often results in unsuccessful results despite significant investments.
• Only if you knew a way to harness the power of social media for SEO, your website could rank much better.

What is Social Listening?

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Social listening gathers information relevant to your brand reputation, while social media monitoring deals with engagement numbers.
Most people often confuse social listening with social media monitoring.
It's easy to get confused between the two. This is because they might appear to cater to similar needs in a broader context.
Before the age of social media tools, there was a time when the organic search was focused on building link and optimizing keywords.
Social listening explores all possible channels on the Internet for any news or chatter about their brand.
For example, there could be people talking about your brand or reviewing it on Facebook. They could be creating relevant videos on YouTube as well.
Unless you monitor all of these, chances are you'll miss engaging with these followers. This makes it essential for you to keep your eyes open for any social signal by social listening.

How Can Social Listening Impact Your SEO/Rankings?

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Social listening has a lot of potential for your website. All major website owners do it. So, if you haven't got started on it, you're already losing the market race.

1. Turn Brand Mentions into Website Links

Link building still lies at the core of search engine optimization efforts. For this reason, you shouldn't miss out on them. Brand mentions are one of the most popular ways to build your links.
For example, your brand might be around for a while. There is a strong possibility that people will be talking about it in different places. These might be on platforms like blogs, forums, social media, news websites, etc.
Chances are, not all people who mention you will add links to your website. But, you can still request them to add a link. Most people do not care about promoting your website, so they won't care to link the mentions.
Therefore, the biggest challenge for you would be to find those linkless mentions. While you can't do it manually, try leveraging some popular tools for the task. Start by filtering out the options so that you only get to see the relevant stuff.

2. Identify Your Target Audience

Identifying your audience can be a difficult task at first. But, with the assistance of the right tools, it can be as easy as pie. Social listening helps you know your customers better.
As a website owner, you might have a broader idea of who they are. But, with social listening, you get to know your customer personas in detail.
It starts with understanding how your audience interacts with your brand. And then you get to know which content types they prefer and why.
The idea is to go beyond the simple demographics to paint a picture of your customer.
When you know them like you would know a customer who's been purchasing for you repeatedly, you build a sound strategy. In other words, you create campaigns that are powerful enough to keep your audiences engaged.

3. Find Your Audience's Response to Your Competition

Keeping an eye on your competitor is one thing in SEO. An altogether important aspect is monitoring your audience's response to your competitors.
Remember that when you're shaping your strategies with your competitor's changing moves, they are doing it too.
They will too try to lure your customers into buying their products. However, if you know that your customers are being carried towards your biggest rivals, you can take timely steps.
Social listening can help you with identifying those keywords that your rivals have started using recently. Alternatively, you can also keep an eye on any new content types that they've recently adopted.
For example, they might be using GIFs on their social media. This, in turn, might draw an enormous response from the customer.

4. Keep an Eye on New Links

Not all of your backlinks might be healthy. It means that you need to hunt links that are useful for your SEO. With social listening, this is just a cakewalk.
Today, search engine optimization is more about building quality links than just any links. This makes it quite essential to keep an eye on any new links you’re getting on the web.
Knowing new links is useful for a variety of reasons.

• First, it gives your marketing efforts an upper hand.
• Second, you get to know where your backlinks are coming from.

This is because you want to ensure that you only get links from quality websites.

Related : Legit Ways to Earn Backlinks to Your Site

5. Discover New Content Generation Opportunities

One of the best strategies to advance your game in SEO is guest blogging. Even the newest of website owners realize its importance.
While guest blogging doesn't instantly help boost your SEO rank, it surely does help you build links. Most importantly, it boosts your website's reputation.
One of the best ways to find guest blogging opportunities is through social listening.

• Start by picking a tool and searching for the relevant keywords.
• Once you begin your search, you need to filter out the currently writing blogs for these keywords.
• This way, you can figure out platforms and people talking about a topic you might be interested in.

Similarly, you can also come across social media influencers in your search. You might be surprised to find out how many of these have a dedicated blog with your target audience.
Partnering with such people and blog owners can help you build quality links. Additionally, it can also enhance your current audience base.

6. Increase Your Brand Mentions

There are no doubts about the fact that link building still lies at the heart of SEO.
At the same time, you also need to work on other strategies to boost your rankings. This is because, with new updates, Google is constantly trying to improve its algorithm. It is finding ways to discover the actual value of content and websites. And guess what?
It is similar to how we do as humans.
Today, search engine optimization is more about being famous. It is about hearing your brand name across social media, blogs, and other websites.
Therefore, you need to get people to talk about your brand. With social listening, you track brand mentions effortlessly.
When you have a clear picture of your brand mentions, you get to know where you need to put your efforts. For example, if you are not getting enough mentions from social media, you advance your strategies there.

7. Take Tips from Your Competitors

You can't let your competitors slip through your eyes when you're running a website. This means that you need to know what they're doing right now, as it will help you stay a step ahead in the market.
The point is that no matter which SEO tool you use, it will help you learn about your competitor. Now the tips that you apply to your business can also unearth your competitors' facts.
Set Alert: Many tools also let you set an alert for your vital competitors. This will make it easier for you to see through their strategy.
Alternatively, it also helps you compare your progress to their growth.
Improve Engagement: You might often not understand why you are failing to gather engagement over something working perfectly a while ago. But, looking at the competitor can easily give you an idea of changing trends, etc.

8. Participate in Relevant Topics on Time

Social listening shines at offering you opportunities. It digs into the most relevant topics for your band over the web. And then it lets you take advantage of these.
With social listening tools, you can find out what interests your audience the most. Make a note of these topics. Then start working on your content and campaigns that can impact your audience.
The underlying idea is to help you create content that appeals to your audience.
There is no point in creating campaigns loaded with content that fail to engage your audience. If there's a relevant buzz going around on the Internet, you've got to be there.
Remember that content is a significant part of SEO. For this reason, it is vital to come up with timely and effective pieces. Social listening helps you talk about topics that matter to your audience.

9. Leverage Social Influencers

Social media influencers have a huge fan following on social media.
If you look for influencers in your industry, you're more likely to find your audience as their followers. Therefore, it can be beneficial for your brand to work together with influencers in your industry.
Related : Influencer Marketing for Ecommerce: A Virtual Pocket Guide
Partner with such people and let them talk about your brand and offerings.
With social listening, you can easily find influencers with a broad audience and popularity on social media platforms.
Getting together with these people will help you make the most of your efforts. In other words, you'll be targeting people who are more likely to respond to your campaigns and strategies.

9 Useful Social Listening Tools To Increase Your SEO/Rankings

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Take a look at some of the best social listening tools to increase your SEO and website rankings.

1. Mention

Mention is one of the most impressive social listening tools in the market. It lets you monitor social media and the web in real-time and set up alerts. While historical data is available on request underpaid plans, you can view results from the past 24 hours anytime.
Mention lets you do a lot by helping you discover influencers on Twitter and Instagram. Additionally, it also allows you to build your custom reports and automate delivery.

2. Brandwatch

Brandwatch offers in-depth analytics for social media measurement for your enterprise. If you're looking to generate interactive visualizations of your SEO data, this is for you.
The tool is one of the most powerful analytics that offers demographic data, trending topics, image recognition, etc. Moreover, with its API access and dashboards, you can make customizable presentations anytime and anywhere.

3. Awario

While some social listening tools are powerful, they are also expensive. In case you're looking for something more affordable, Awario is the ideal option for you. It is a relatively new tool in the market but lets you do a lot with the least investment.
Using this tool, you can monitor the mentions of your brand and competitors across the industry. If you have some complex queries, you can customize the tool and set Boolean operations for them.

4. Snaplytics

Managing your Instagram and Snapchat stories can be a challenging task. However, with Snaplytics, you get to create and manage your stories with ease. Be in charge of your content and respond to the audience who send you messages.
You can also measure the impact of your stories and schedule your content in advance. Most importantly, you get to leverage user-generated content and repost them on social media.

5. TweetReach

If you're a brand that extensively works on the Twitter platform, TweetReach is for you. It is a great tool to look into your Twitter audience and reach.
All you have to do is select a keyword, person, hashtag, or Twitter handle; the tool offers you data and reports based on your selection.
Additionally, the tool also helps you find out about your highest impressionable followers. This way, you can create campaigns specifically for them.

6. Hootsuite

If there's one tool that takes care of your brand mentions across the entire web, it is Hootsuite. It allows you to value your audience. You do this by responding to their messages, comments, and other brand mentions. The concise dashboard is one of the main attractions of the tool.
You can track influencers, optimize the engagement for your content and do more. Manage all your social media and track competitor activity from under one roof.

7. IFTTT

You can leverage a free automation tool, If This Then That, for quite many things. One of the biggest challenges is to get notifications when your brand is mentioned anywhere on the web.
With IFTTT, you can create an applet that allows you to get an email every time you receive a brand mention.
All you have to do is select your industry in the RSS feed. Then you can share content from one channel to another hassle-free.

8. Keyhole

Take your social listening efforts to the next level with Keyhole. Sometimes you need to track activities happening on the web that are beyond your brand name and mentions.
With Keyhole, you get to track your industry-specific keywords. No more waiting to take part in a buzzing conversation. Just find what is happening in your industry and take part in it instantly.

9. Iconosquare

Another powerful tool for social listening is Iconosquare. The tool helps you monitor and analyze social media content. It has a robust publishing solution with detailed analytics. The automated reports from the tool help you measure the success of social media platforms almost instantly.
Additionally, you get real-time information on your content engagement. With Iconoqueare, you discover the ways people are talking about your brand on social media and the Internet.

Social Listening FAQs

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1. What Are Some of the Key Performance Indicators of Social Listening?

Remember that the ultimate goal of social listening is to unearth insights about your brand and the industry in general. This helps you stay afloat with the trends and preferences of your audiences.
The performance indicators of any social listening tool can be:-

• To deliver the best results from the data search
• Produce results from an industry sentiment rating algorithm
• Customize visualizations and get filtered data
• Helps automate social engagement efforts

2. Which Are Some of the Good Social Listening Tools That Are Also FREE?

There are several social listening tools that you can leverage for free. Most tools offer a limited-time free plan, after which making a purchase becomes necessary.
However, if you're not looking to spend any money on these tools, some of the options that you can consider are Google Alerts, Mention, Google Trends, among others.

3. How Do Marketers Use Social Listening?

Marketers use social listening for a variety of activities. On the one hand, it helps build long-term client relationships. While on the other, it provides insights into the marketing efforts. Therefore, marketers can stay updated with customer preferences and tweak their strategies based on their customers' likings.

4. What Is the Difference Between Social Listening and Social Media Monitoring?

While it is easy to get confused between the two, they differ in quite many aspects. Social media monitoring refers to collecting the data across media channels.
This can be later used for searching, defining a strategy, etc.
On the other hand, social listening helps you scan the Internet, including social media, for any mentions of your brand. Alternatively, they also help in discovering any mentions for social media, competitors, products, etc.

Conclusion

Social listening can be the difference between the success and failure of your entrepreneurial venture.

• It can help you track down the changes your competitors are adapting to get ahead in the race.
• It can also help you understand your customers as you do in a retail scenario.
• Whether you're a website owner or running your store, social listening can help you take off your idea and value your customers.
• It lets you capitalize on the opportunities that you had no idea about.

So, instead of wondering why your competitor might be getting ahead of you, try social listening. It is a crucial aspect of your audience and brand research.
Get in touch with us to know more about social listening and SEO.