Gone are the days of SEO being a straightforward process of keyword research, on-page optimization, and link building. As Google adds other factors to its algorithm and learns to assess website quality in a human-like way, SEO becomes intertwined with other marketing tactics. 

In this post, We explain how social listening can benefit your SEO.

First things first: let’s figure out the meaning behind “social listening”. The term describes what social media listening (also called social media monitoring) tools do. 

They crawl the blogs, news, forums, Web, and social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Linked In, etc.) to find mention of any given keywords. Keywords are usually brand names, words that describe the industry, or people’s names.

Using social listening for SEO requires proper knowledge and skill. It’s very important to set specific goals and know the details of how to conduct a proper search. Here’s how to go about it:

Monitor new links to your site.

Modern link-building means knowing where and how your backlinks are being built. First, it’s useful to know marketing purposes: what if you can get more out of the website that already links to you? Second, you’ve got to know if your backlinks are coming from quality sites, because, as we know, links from spam and untrustworthy sites can seriously hurt the rankings.

You learn about any new links in real-time anywhere on the Internet using social listening. To start searching for fresh connections, put the URL of your Website into a website / Web page area provided in most tools to monitor social media and search for the Web plus news/blog from restricted sources.

This will exclude mentions that come from social media platforms (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Linked In, etc.). You can also use the link: operator if your tool offers Boolean search.

Find unlinked brand mentions and turn them into links. 

With link building still being at the core of any SEO strategy, it’s vital to cover all such opportunities. Here’s the one you might not have thought about: turning existing brand mentions into links.

If your brand has been around for a while, or if your brand, company, or a specific product has had any kind of popularity at some point, it’s almost certain that there are mentions of your brand on the Internet: on blogs, forums, news sites or just somewhere on the Web.

Not all of them will link back to your site: writers don’t care about promoting anyone else but themselves; they don’t have your SEO goals in mind, and the idea of linking might’ve never even crossed their minds. 

However, that doesn’t mean they would have a problem with adding a link if you ask them. So the only real challenge here is to find the linkless mentions. This is where social listening is relevant.

Grow brand mentions.

While link building is still essential in SEO, it is becoming less and less so. You can see how passionately Google is working towards new ways of figuring out the real value of websites, understanding their content, and being more and more capable of evaluating the Internet the way humans do. 

The Internet is much more than just links. These days it’s more about being popular, going viral, and being heard in its various corners. Most of all, the Internet is about social media: taken together, the most used websites don’t have any do-follow links.

Learn from your competitors. 

All the tips above can be used to monitor your competitors and discover where they get links, where they guest post, with which influencers they work, and so on. All this information can be used in your marketing and SEO strategy. 

The workflow is as straightforward as it gets: everything that you’ve done for your brand can be completed using your competitors’ brand names and URLs. 

Creating a different alert for every vital competitor will make the task even easier and let you see your progress compared to that of your competitors in a clear and detailed way.

Conclusion

Social listening is full of possibilities. It’s this new, not-totally-explored-yet technology that slowly changes the way we do digital marketing. Try using it for SEO and you might see changes you never expected to see.