From breaking news, sports, entertainment, and other topics, Twitter continues to carry a massive audience. The social networking service can be an effective tool for businesses and brands because of its versatility of media and through viability in search results. So how do you use Twitter to improve Google search results? This article details integrating search engine optimization (SEO) tactics with five main ideas.
Kristen M Vaughn for Search Engine Journal:
1. Build Your Brand Identity & Awareness
Google your brand’s name. What shows up?
Most of the time, you will see something similar to this on the first page of search results:
Screenshot from search, Google, August 2022
What you’re seeing is Google’s Twitter carousel.
This can be highly beneficial for users to get to know a brand by browsing through some of their most recent tweets.
And it also gives you direct control over what appears in search results around your brand’s name. That’s a big deal!
How often do we get a chance to control what users see in search results? Rarely.
In addition to getting a positive message in front of potential consumers, it’s another way to build awareness, strengthen thought leadership, and humanize the brand.
It helps you to connect with your audience in a more authentic and easily digestible form.
This is another reason why it’s important to share content that your audiences will find interesting and valuable and show your personality.
It’s also essential to ensure your tweets align with your brand messaging and overall business mission.
2. Leverage Twitter Carousels
Look for ways to leverage a Twitter carousel by using relatable and relevant content.
Your brand can implement one of the numerous trending tactics. But here are a few of the most important ones to consider:
Discuss Trendy Topics
This is your chance to grab the attention of new audiences and help retain your current ones. So, ensure your tweets reflect how timely, exciting and trendy you are!
What are people in your industry talking about? Do you have a new product or event coming up? Try creating engaging copy and imagery reflecting that through a Twitter carousel.
Deliver Content Your Audiences Care About
In addition to being trendy, ensure you’re sharing extremely relevant content with your audiences. Keep in mind their everyday challenges and main responsibilities.
Then ask yourself, “What would my audience want to learn more about? Why do they enjoy our products or services?” And highlight those aspects in a carousel.
Mention Other Accounts & Encourage Other Accounts To Mention You
Interacting with other relevant accounts and tagging them in tweets will help increase search presence.
Think about the key publications, thought leaders, and influencers in your space, and make sure you’re regularly engaging with them on Twitter.
Try finding things you have in common or aspects you can collab on.
These interactions can help get your content in front of new audiences. It also brings more authenticity to your brand when people see someone they recognize using a product or engaging with a brand they follow.
Use Relevant, Popular Hashtags
Incorporate relevant hashtags in your tweets. This will give you a chance to rank on SERPs.
Exemplify Your Brand Message
You want to make sure your audience isn’t confused by your tweets. They should clearly understand what your brand is all about and why they should care.
Targeted keywords and a clear call to action will help grab their attention and keep them engaged.
Encourage Team Members To Share Content
The Twitter carousel appears for individuals as well.
With this in mind, encouraging your internal team members to promote content can impact your brand’s search visibility.
3. Remain Active & Build Your Following
Remaining active on Twitter and across all your social media accounts is essential to keep your audiences engaged.
The key is ensuring that tweets are relevant and valuable and that you’re not just tweeting to get content out there.
We know the importance of social media legitimacy and its potential impact on Google rankings.
For example, a social media account with 10,000 followers and two posts differs from another 10,000-follower account with consistent interactions and posts.
Even more interestingly, Google filed a patent to determine whether social media accounts were real or fake. This can help get rid of the clutter of fake accounts and followers.
Nevertheless, the focus should be on building a following and establishing a more vast audience.
By doing this, you can increase the likelihood that users know your brand and will trust and click on your content in search results.
And do you know what directly impacts Google rankings? Click-through rates.
4. Promote Content
Creating a Twitter strategy to distribute and promote content long-term is essential. This requires more than just sharing content on a daily or weekly basis.
Promoting evergreen content, or brand-specific content, over a month or even a year will help increase visibility on social media and in search results.
Also, generating shares on social media will help from a link-building perspective.
The more reach you have on social media, the more opportunities users have to see your content, like it, and be motivated to link to it.
Links also directly impact Google rankings. And again, encourage your internal team members to promote your content, especially anyone who’s an established thought leader in the space.
This will help reach new, relevant users and appear in search results around those individuals’ accounts.
5. Optimize Your Social Media Bio
Twitter also discusses how you can impact search visibility on Google, not just through your posts but through what you put in your Twitter profile.
It’s not only essential to optimize your brand’s Twitter bio for Google but because it’s the first thing anyone will see when they click on your profile.
Considering that your brand’s Twitter profile often appears on the first page of Google, you want your first impression with new users to describe your brand and mission accurately.
This presents the opportunity to provide a concise overview of your brand and a link to your website. And it allows you to incorporate keywords, emojis, and hashtags that will get their attention.
Using Twitter with an effective strategy (offsite SEO) can result in improved visibility in Google search results. This can increase your brand’s awareness, increase followers, and engage in new potential customers.
