If you want a strong social media strategy, you simply can’t ignore SEO. Columnist Jordan Kasteler discusses how social and SEO work hand-in-hand.

Everyone understands that a good social media strategy is the holy grail for businesses; it molds the perception of a brand, carries the voice, creates the appeal, and as a result, increases revenue. There are a few fundamentals that can help enhance the strategy, but SEO, or search engine optimization, is hardly ever considered. Big mistake! Here’s why.

I’ll start by stating that social media and SEO are heavily tied to each other. SEO data can help improve your social efforts, and social media can help with the search rankings.

In fact, SEO data provides a bunch of information about your visibility and target audience: who they are, how they search for things, what keywords they’re using and what sites they’re surfing, not to mention the good old profiling data found in Google Analytics, SimilarWeb and Global Webs Ranking.

Let’s dig in deeper.