As Social Media has taken off, it’s become harder and harder to get noticed through the noise of pages and brands out there. This is natural and exactly the same thing that happened with search engines over time. This makes how discoverable and clickable your social profile is, even more important.

With Google indexing millions upon millions of websites, getting to the top of the search list, and then getting users to click through, is challenging. But not impossible. This is called SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation and is the the driver of organic web traffic. Not to be confused with SEM (Search Engine Marketing), or Paid traffic.

But now you’re probably asking why that is important or relevant to Social Media. Stay with me on this, for all shall become clear in a moment.

What Makes a Page Discoverable and Clickable?

Ok, so let’s start by giving an explanation of how I’ve started off by comparing SEO and Social Media

All platforms are basically giant search engines with different criteria. But, ultimately their final goal is to help their users find relevant content (discoverability). The final step – getting them to click on that link or profile – is up to you. This is how “Clickable” the link is.

In SEO, those two concepts are the pillars that specialists have been trying to keep ahead of for years. Continually playing cat and mouse with Google and their ever-changing algorithms – the bit of Google’s search system that ranks and prioritizes results. And now they have to throw in Social Media changes as well.

Why is this important?

Well, no-one wants to rely on advertising alone – as much as the major channels in Social Media would like you to. That, and there are negatives to just spending money, especially when you factor in risks such as Click Fraud.

This is where the organic – SEO – comes in. This is what will give you long-term growth and build a stable audience when you get it right. Paid advertising will give you short-term kicks, but the difference between a short-term and long-term sustainability comes down to optimizing organically, all-be-it with the support of tools like Metigy.

So let’s focus on what those two terms mean for your business.

Improving Discoverability

As I touched on before, this is to do with how visible and how highly ranked your page is. Now the second of those is something that comes with having a bigger, more engaged fan base. Obviously with the exception of if a user types in the exact name of your page.

When it comes to discoverability, you need to do some homework and figure out what to optimize for. I’m going to tell you a tip to find some of the phrases people search for.

Using Auto-Complete to Discover Keywords to Optimise For

Now a really good, free trick on Facebook, Google or YouTube – they will all be slightly different – is to use their Auto-complete search. That is to say, start typing something and they will suggest variants of what you type.

You know your brand and business goals the best. Take the few words or phrases that mean the most for your business. For example Metigy, I’ll say Martech, Social Media Marketing and AI Marketing. Those would be our start point. So let’s try “digital marketing” in Google:

Google Search for Digital Marketing

You can instantly see our search term and 10 others. That list is the most popular search terms related to the keyword you put in! That’s right. They tell you, for free, what the most popular search phrases are based on what you asked.

Why is this a good thing?

All you literally have to do is type your first word or phrase first word into their search box. You should get some auto-complete suggestions. OK, so this won’t tell you in-depth information like search volume, complexity, etc. But it will tell you what people like to search for on their platforms.

I’ll show you how to do this in a minute.

One thing of note here, before I carry on, is that these keywords you identify can and should be used in your posts and anything else you write as often as possible when they are relevant. That’s the core of effective SEO.

Encouraging Clicks

Now we have your page appearing in search, we still need to entice the user to click on your page rather than others, especially if you are in a crowded space. We need to make it clickable.

This is down using a combination of the Logo and the description – be mindful of the target as, for example, Google Search doesn’t include an image, but Facebook does.

So, for example, let’s do a search of Facebook for that well-known brand, Coca-Cola:

Facebook Search Results for Coca-Cola

In that example, it’s the same brand globally but the Brazilian one really stands out as the most unique and eye-catching.

Next up comes their descriptions – the Brazilian one is market specific. Again, looking to the search results for Coca-Cola, look at the first and second results. The first one instantly sounds more appealing! Who wouldn’t want to visit the “Happiest Facebook page on, um, Facebook”? The second one is, well, waffle tbh.

You start to see how that can draw the user in by making your page more appealing. So think how you can combine how discoverable your page is with how clickable it is.

Let’s Give It a Try

Let’s run through an exercise using Google. Please note, I’m doing this using an incognito window so that my personal search history has no impact on the results – although they will still use some location data.

In this exercise, I will not include a logo design but focus on the words only as you can get the gist of the logo in the Coca-Cola example above.

Optimize to be Discoverable

For this exercise, I’m going to assume we have a Mountain Bike business focused on trail tours around Sydney and parts of Australia called Skippy Trail Tours.

1st let’s explore cycling

Google search result for Cycling

That has just told us the top searches in Google beginning with the word “cycling”. Of that list, the ones that might be useful for our train company are:

• cycling for beginners
• cycling benefits
• cycling exercise

Some good long tail words there, but not core business drivers.

Next, let’s explore “mountain bike” to see what we get

Google search result for Mountain Bike

That’s more like it! Several words jump out of the list (note I used singular for “bike” to get the most results). Our favourite results there are:

• Mountain Bike trails
• Mountain Bike trails Sydney
• Mountain Bikes Australia

Bingo! So our core business happens to be a key search around that term!

Discoverable Page Description

Let’s turn that information, combined with the long-tail searches to come up with the first pass of our tagline:

See Sydney with Skippy Trail Tours. Mountain Bike Trails around Australia. Get the benefits of cycling exercise at all levels, beginner and up.

In that sentence, I have used:

• Mountain Bike Trails as the primary phrase
• cycling exercise as the secondary
• Includes our long-tail modifier words to expand the search opportunity
  • Australia
  • Sydney
  • Benefit
  • Beginner

That’s a good start! We’ve got something that should get us discovered! Now, let’s try and get people to click on it.

Optimize Text to be Clickable

Ok, so that phrase is fairly unexciting and a bit long tbh. I did it make a point that it’s not always good to keyword stuff. That’s an attempt to get as much as possible into a sentence.

Now, there is a whole raft of things to do around this, and that will be another article.

Clickable description version one

For now, I will take show you the final version of this sentence and tell you what I did and why:

Discover Sydney and Tour fabulous Australian Scenery on unique Mountain Bike Trails. The exhileration and benefits of cycling have never been so beautiful for everyone from beginners and up!

In that I’ve done a few things:

• First, and most obviously, I’ve dropped our company name. The name is not what people will click on – unless you’re someone massive like Facebook or Google. So let’s save that word count for something better
• I’ve started with the word ‘Discover’ which is a proven conversion word, along with a few other words that are all designed to stir emotion in the reader the more of the sentence that they read
  • unique
  • exhilaration
  • beautiful
• And our main search term of “Mountain Bike Trails” is in there
• As are our long-tail terms:
  • Sydney
  • Tour
  • Australia
  • benefits
  • cycling

Skippy Trail Tours is not actually important in the search result. Believe it or not, that will come in naturally later on through it’s association to the rest of this.

Clickable description version two

What if we went further? Remember that Coca-Cola description? OK, so they are one of those huge companies like I said, so people probably do just search for Coca-Cola. But, their mantra on the wording was spot on. So how about:

Explore Sydney Like Never Before! Awesome and unique Mountain Bike Trail Tours for all skill levels! Discover the Australia you’ve never seen before!

So I’ve sacrificed a few of our keywords to do that which is fine. Now we know what those words are, let’s make sure to weave them into the rest of our copy, tags, images, etc. In that  we have:

• A very emotional, powerful starter phrase that is not too long and hooks you at the very beginning.
• Some emotional words that really big up the excitement of seeing Australia this way:
  • “Like never before” – where else can you do this? Nowhere! So come to us!
  • “never seen before” – one of those positive negative statements that stick in your mind
  • Awesome, Unique and Discover will stir the reader’s feeling
• And finally some of our long-tail words
  • Australia
  • Sydney
  • Skill Levels (catering for the beginner and up markets)

I hope that you get the gist of what we’re trying to do here. We could go further and make that, even more, focused an exciting.

This article was designed to get you thinking and understand how to explore and focus what you write.

So What next?

Now you have a grasp of what these two terms mean, I want you to go an read the description for your Facebook page, Twitter page and any other Social media pages. Then I want you to ask two questions:

• What is it I’m trying to optimize this for? This is how discoverable
• Would someone click on that description over the 200+ others ones that came up? How clickable.

This exercise is something you should do for every page and profile you have. OK, so realistically that is a LOT of work to do for an existing website, and I’ll cover how to prioritize updating your website and YouTube in another article.

In the meantime, go and have a look at all of your social profiles and ask those two questions and see what you can do to improve them. And the homepage of your website if you have one.

For the next update, I’ll talk about prioritizing what your optimize.