So you’ve been doing some SEO research for your business and wondered… what’s the difference between hashtags and keywords, and how can using these benefit my business?
Firstly, keywords – be it hashed or otherwise – remain super important for businesses to this day. It helps create a bridge to what people want to search for (such as trending topics), and the existing content that can match the needs of these searches.
The hashtag serves as a poster-child for social media and network platformisations of the 2010’s – as browsing quickly became saturated with torrents of user-generated content, newly supported formats of media and an increasing bandwidth to consume content on-demand, a need to organise how this content can be better categorised became a pressing need for both user experience and marketing visibility alike. SEO Melbourne explores more on the topic, and how the emergence of the hashtag came to integrate into modern SEM theory.
How do Keywords Work?
By understanding what important keywords you should be using to target your intended audience, you signal what density of users your content is being directed towards. If you’re creating a piece of content about a topic that isn’t widely spoken about, for instance, this could mean increasing your chances of capitalising on the existing search interest in the market, as the topic isn’t as saturated with competitor content. Keyword relevancy refers to how relevant, or important, certain keywords or phrases are to each page of your website.
Google often uses keyword relevancy as a metric to determine whether content is suitable as a search result for the queries that include its use. Take the following example – a reusable cup business in Melbourne called ‘Coffee Me’ sells their products at a reasonable price. Prospective visitors may type in ‘affordable reusable coffee cups’, and webpages targeting the keyword (or other semantically related phrases) could pop up within the top search results. Search engines like Google are able to interpret how useful a given piece of content is to a given keyword, based on criteria like on-page SEO best practices and well-written copy, and deliver them as a result ranked against other webpages within the space in the form of a search engine result page.
Reaching a Larger AudienceÂ
A hashtag, on the other hand, is a word or phrase preceded by a hash sign (#). This is used on social media websites/ apps, to identify and label content associated with a specific topic.
Using hashtags on platforms like Instagram is a great way to reach a larger pool of individuals. This can help you promote your product/website, expand or refine your content reach, and better categorise your social profile to only associate with industries / fields / hobbies that are relevant to you. By doing this, you can then strengthen your brand, target your market, have your business found online, and improve your SEO profile by communicating signals of high engagement and positive sentiment.
Using Hashtags On Social Media Platforms
It’s noted that 60% of instagram users learn about new products through Instagram. By being active on a variety of platforms, this allows for you to diversify existing content vertically, essentially maximising your reach without necessarily needing to invest in new content. It should be noted, though – aside from crawling links and prompting indexation, social media links from Instagram will not directly help your SEO.
According to Business Insider, 72% of Instagram users have purchased a product that they’ve seen on the app. As users become aware of your business and what you offer, begin to orbit our brand in a much closer way, accumulating trust between brand and customer to begin exploring other potential offers on the site, resources and general webpages that can be explored.Â
Hashtags are widely popular on Twitter, where many users tweet about topics that are currently trending as a social marker of what’s currently occupying the cultural eye. These are great, as they combine a collection of opinions and thoughts grouped within a hashtag.
As an example, – Coca Cola’s 2014 marketing campaign, centred around the #ShareACoke dynamic in which customers were able to find bottles with their names, gained worldwide virality. The underlying mechanism involved a personal connection with the customer, encouraging customers to integrate the #ShareACoke memetic culture with friends, family and other social communities.
The Connection Between Hashtags For SEO Rankings
The link between hashtags and SEO signalling lies in the idea of user engagement – hashtag implementation is likely to be seen by more people on social media, which increases the surface area of engagement as an important metric to search engines like Google.
Taking a user experience perspective – users who enjoy the content that you create, for example, become much more likely to explore other areas of your site for similar value offerings, prompting a UX journey that suddenly spans multiple platforms, webpages and calls-to-action, depending on how much they buy into your brand.
From an SEO perspective – each of these value engagements become characterised by Google as a sign of high usefulness for users searching within the field or industry. High metrics of engagement like dwell time, session engagement, event count and more each signal evidence of value for users, which the search engine then interprets as a great sign of subject – and eventual domain – authority in its given industry.
Apart from choosing a topic that isn’t too saturated, any articles written must be researched well and in-depth. The content produced has to be good enough to be in the top three search results on Google.
Selecting Your Hashtags
No Generic Hashtags
When adding hashtags to your Instagram posts, remember to always think from a customer’s point of view. What they would search for when trying to find a brand/ product like yours? This doesn’t mean blandly hashtagging popular fields such as #coffee. These hashtags are too popular and competitive, and require a game-changing amount of attention to differentiate from the 800,000 other images posted in the same field.
Going back to the Coffee Me example, by thinking in a more niche strategic way, you could use phrases like #ReusableCoffeeCup, #EnvironmentallyFriendly or #WarOnWaste to attract a real audience with the same values which aligns to your brand, rather than a broad capture of a user only vaguely related to your product. By doing this, you’re able to generate a real-life and authentic following. Ensuring that your brand is always visible on social media, you can then begin transferring this presence with your website/ posts that relate to your brand/campaign, and boost site views by reaching an engaged audience with similar interests.
Keywords on the other hand, especially long-tailed keywords, are super helpful when trying to have your business discoverable on Google. By being more specific to what your niche is, you’re able to target the right audience, without having your post/ website getting lost in a sea of articles exactly the same as your own. E.g. if you’re selling ‘coffee cups’, be more specific and use ‘environmentally friendly reusable coffee cups’ instead.
Call to Action Strategy
Using a ‘Call to Action’ strategy is also a great way to grow your account and keep your audience engaged. You should ask yourself – why would people want to follow your instagram account or read the content you’re producing? What would they get out of it? For platofrms like Instagram, this could be promoting discounts/ sales. It is shown that 41% of instagrammers would follow purely just to take advantage of any promotions going on. Always remember to follow up posts with a clickable/tracked link in your bio at all times to gain maximum exposure!
Choosing relevant keywords related to your business can also be a tricky one. These are certain words or phrases that should link back to your website/ company. By including the most relevant keywords, this can help determine what ranking you are on the Google search. E.g. For Coffee Me, this could be: Reusable coffee cups, reusable cups, environmentally friendly cups, and eco friendly coffee cups.
Final Thoughts – Hashtags for SEO
Social media may not have direct impact on website rankings – however, they are a great and powerful tool to use when leveraging your SEO. Using social media to amplify your content distribution can help attract a larger audience and increase your visibility on both social media accounts and your actual website. This is done through social likes and shares. If you would like help with your social media marketing, or anything and everything SEO-related, find us at SEO Company Melbourne – experts in providing professional and proven SEO results.
