For years, when we talked about getting a business found online, the conversation was almost always about Google. We learned about keywords, SEO, website optimisation, and making sure our businesses appeared when somebody searched for the products or services we offered. That hasn’t changed; Google is still incredibly important, but the way people search for information online has changed, and now more searches are happening directly on individual social media platforms.
Think about how you use social media yourself. If you're looking for a restaurant while you're away for the weekend, you might search Instagram to see what the food looks like and what other customers have posted. If you're trying to work out how to do something, you might search TikTok for a quick explanation or demonstration. If you're looking for somebody who provides a particular business service, you might search LinkedIn and look at their profile and recent posts before you ever visit their website.
This is why social SEO is becoming something businesses need to understand. It isn't about abandoning traditional SEO or suddenly trying to turn every Instagram caption into a keyword exercise. It's about recognising that Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn are also “discovery and search” platforms, and making sure you're giving them enough information to understand what your business does and when your content might be useful to somebody searching for it.
Social SEO is the process of making your social media profiles and content easier to discover through search. Just as you might optimise a page on your website around a subject your potential customers are looking for, you can make iteasier for social platforms to understand the subjects you talk about, the services you provide and the people you help.
If somebody searches Instagram for "social media training Ireland", TikTok for "how to create a social media strategy" or LinkedIn for"digital marketing trainer", the platform needs to decide which accounts and content are most relevant to the user. The clearer you are about what you do and the topics that you regularly create content about, the easier you make that job.
This is also why businesses need to move beyond thinking that successful social media marketing simply means posting three or four times every week. You can post consistently for years, but if your profile doesn't clearly explain what you do and your content doesn't use the language your customers use when searching,you'll likely get missed in their discovery.
One of the first things I would recommend is looking at the language you currently use to describe your business. We often become so familiar with our own industry terminology, product and service names, and descriptions that we forget our customers might describe exactly the same thing very differently.
You might have a brilliant name for your product, but somebody who has never heard of your business isn't going to search for that name. They're much more likely to search for something that describes their problem, such as for me it would be "social media help for small business", and for others it would be "accountant for small business Ireland", "wedding photographer Westmeath" or "how to market my business on Instagram".
This is where keyword research can be useful, but you can also learn a lot simply by listening to your customers. Look at the questions you're asked during consultations, training sessions, phone calls, and emails and pay attention to how people describe their problems when they first contact you. Those words and questions can become incredibly useful content ideas. You might also find the wording in your testimonials useful as well.
You don't need to start stuffing keywords awkwardly into everything you write. The objective is to make your content clearer and more relevant, not to make it sound as though it was written for a search engine rather than a person.
Take a look at your Instagram or LinkedIn profile and imagine you know absolutely nothing about the business behind it. Can you tell within a few seconds what the business does, who it helps, and perhaps where it operates?
Something like "Helping you achieve your dreams" might sound positive, but it doesn't tell a potential customer whether you're a business coach, financial adviser, fitness trainer or marketing consultant. Your profile name, bio, LinkedIn headline, and About section are opportunities to give both people and the platforms useful context about what you actually do.
If you're a social media trainer, photographer, accountant, beauty professional, or business consultant, don't be afraid to actually say so. If location matters to to your business, particularly if you serve customers within a particular town, county, or region, make that clear too. Being descriptive doesn't mean your profile has to be boring. It simply means that somebody discovering you for the first time shouldn't have to work out what you do.
Your captions, videos and the words you put on a screen can all help platforms understand what your content is about. This doesn't mean every caption needs to beelong or that every video needs to have an overly descriptive introduction, but somebody discovering that piece of content for the first time should understandthe subject.
For example, if you've created a Reel about mistakes businesses make on Instagram, you could start with "You need to stop doing this!" and it might create curiosity, but it doesn't provide much context. Something like "If you're using Instagram to market your small business, these are three common mistakes that could be making it harder to reach the right people" still gives you a hook while making the subject much clearer.
The same applies to the text you put on videos. "Here's my top tip for today" tells us very little, whereas "How to plan a month of social media content for your small business" immediately tells somebody whether the video is relevant to them.
We sometimes become so focused on creating clever hooks that we forget to tell people what the content is actually about. Curiosity is useful, but clarity matters too.
One of the things I like most about thinking in terms of social SEO is that it gives businesses a much better way of coming up with content ideas. Instead of sitting down every Monday morning and asking, "What am I going to post this week?" start asking, "What is my customer trying to find out?"
A financial adviser could create content around the questions people have as they approach retirement. A beauty professional could answer questions customers ask before choosing a treatment. A restaurant could create content around where to eat locally or what gluten-free options are available. A business consultant could answer questions about pricing, planning, marketing or starting a business.
For my own business, rather than repeatedly posting something that says "Book social media training with me", I can create content answering questions such as "How often should a small business post on social media?", "Why am I posting regularly but getting no enquiries?" or "Should I manage my own social media or outsource it?"
If you're wondering where I find these questions, check out www.answerthepublic.com, a fabulous and FREE resource that anyone can use.
The questions on this platform give me an opportunity to demonstrate what I know while creating useful content for someone who may not be ready to buy yet but is beginning to recognise that they need help.
I wouldn't abandon hashtags completely, but I also wouldn't make them the centre of social SEO strategy. For years businesses were encouraged to find large groups of hashtags and add them to every Instagram post in the hope of increasing reach.
I would put much more emphasis on making sure the entire piece of content clearly communicates its subject. Your caption, the words you use in the video, the text displayed on screen, your profile information and the relevance of the content itself all help provide context. A few genuinely relevant hashtags may still be useful, but they shouldn't be doing all the work.
Before you rush off to create another fifty pieces of content, have a look at what you've already produced. Your old blogs, presentations, training materials, FAQs, LinkedIn posts, newsletters and even questions from customers can contain a huge amount of information that could be repurposed for social search.
An older blog could become several LinkedIn posts (repurposing is your friend!), a question you answer during every consultation could become a Reel, a sectionfrom a workshop could become a carousel and an article written a couple of years ago could be updated and shared again.
You don't have to constantly come up with something completely new. If you've already made time for creating something useful, look for ways to make that knowledge work harder for your business.
There's one thing I don't want you to do as social SEO becomes more important, and that's start writing horrible, keyword-heavy content that nobody actually wants to read. We've already seen that happen with traditional SEO, where some website pages became so focused on ranking https://www.semrush.com/blog/google-panda/that the actual person reading the page seemed to become an afterthought.
Your content still needs personality. You can still tell stories, share opinions, talk about experiences, show behind-the-scenes moments and all that stuff and still create content that starts conversations.
The easiest way to think about social SEO is that you're making your content easier for both people and platforms to understand. That’s the intent anyway.
Social media marketing shouldn't be about filling Monday, Wednesday and Friday on a content calendar because somebody told you consistency was important. Consistency does matter, but there needs to be a reason behind what you're creating. Please read https://www.stomp.ie/post/the-difference-between-posting-and-marketing
Before you create your next post, think about who it's for, what question it answers, what problem it helps with and what somebody might actually search for if they needed that information. Then make sure your content clearly communicates the subject without losing your own voice.
Over time, you begin to create something much more valuable than a collection of social media posts. What you're building is a library of useful content connected to the problems your business solves and the questions your customers ask, giving the right people more opportunities to discover you when they're actively looking for the product, service or solution you provide.
If you're posting regularly but you're not sure whether your social media is actually helping the right people discover your business, it may be time to look beyond how often you're posting and start thinking about the strategy behind it.
I work with businesses to help them understand what they should be creating, who they're trying to reach and how social media can support their wider marketing rather than becoming another job on the weekly to-do list.
If you'd like some help making your social media work more effectively for your business, take a look at my training and support options or get in touch and we can have a chat about where you're getting stuck.
Working with clients Nationwide from base in Mullingar.
