Social SEO Indexing: What B2B Needs To Know

Every generation has their own way to find information. For some, it may have been the library, for others, perhaps Google, Bing, or Ask Jeeves. For Gen Z, the preferred search engine is social media — and other generations are quickly adopting this. A recent Forbes survey shows that 24% of people said they only or primarily use social media for online searches.

People learn information in different ways, such as reading, listening, and watching. As humans, we like to see what other people are doing — especially if they’ve addressed an issue similar to the one we’re asking about — and social media makes it easy to see what people are doing on channels we’re already using and are familiar with. More social posts are including links to the products and solutions featured in videos and images, making it even easier to find (or buy) a solution to our question.

Building on this trend, Google has started crawling public Instagram content and displaying it in search results. This shift makes social media SEO more important than ever. Even if your website is already optimized for search, your brand’s social content also needs to be discoverable to ensure that it appears wherever your audience is looking.

At least 60% of users say their buying decision has been influenced by social media. For B2B companies that rely on a dealer network, aligning your content for social SEO isn't just a marketing exercise — it’s a strategy to help you increase revenue by tapping into the combined power of sales and marketing.

What is SEO for social media and why is it important for B2B?

Social SEO indexing is the process by which search engines (like Google, Bing, and even internal search engines on LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube), crawl, analyze, and determine the importance and relevance of content on social media platforms to include in search results. They rank this content (posts, videos, bios, etc.) based on traditional SEO factors like keywords, AI SEO/GEO signals, and social media KPIs (shares, saves, comments) to determine relevance and popularity.

The typical B2B sales cycle is long and complex. Optimizing your social media content to continue to keep your brand top of mind during this cycle is imperative to help: 

• Establish trust: If a prospective customer sees content shared or commented on by a peer or a thought leader they trust, it can help inform their decision. Similar to traditional SEO, EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust) is extremely important to social SEO indexing and social media algorithms.
• Capture new audiences: Not optimizing content for social media means potentially excluding a whole group of users who are only searching for their questions on those platforms. By covering all bases, you’ll ensure that you’re capturing new users, garnering awareness, and keeping your brand top of mind.
• Shorten the funnel: As your sales team knows, it often takes six to eight touches before a sale. Keeping your content in front of the right audience so it is being seen often can help shorten the awareness and consideration phases faster.

How to improve SEO with social media

In order to make sure your posts will be suggested and ranked higher — both on social media and traditional search engines — it’s important to optimize your profile. Consistent, credible, and SEO-ready social profiles are necessary for ranking higher on traditional search engines. Get your social media profile ready for SEO by optimizing:

1. Name and handle: Your username and profile name should be the same across all social media platforms (if available). Include whichever version of your brand name people are more likely to use when searching for you.
   
   For example, Two Rivers Marketing would be better as @tworiversmarketing, rather than @2rm or @2rmarketing, as people are likely searching for “Two Rivers” or “Two Rivers Marketing.”
    
2. Bio/about section: Use keywords that help users understand what your account is for and that and allow search engines to crawl and categorize your profile.
   
   For example, Two Rivers Marketing’s Instagram bio includes “helping B2B brands win by uniting their marketing organizations, sales teams, and channel partners.”
    
3. Link in bio: Consistently using a tool like LinkTree or SproutLink (a place to aggregate all links and correlate them with specific posts) helps search engines understand the connection between social profiles and other web content.
    
4. Profile photo: If possible, use the same profile photo across all platforms — and make sure it’s a simple, easily identifiable profile photo (such as your logo).

Rather than reinventing the wheel, reference available data for what users are searching for on social media — and make that the foundation for your social SEO strategy. For example, when users watch a video on Instagram or TikTok, a prompt to search for a similar topic often appears immediately under the video. This is a great indicator of the types of information people search for related to a topic. And it’s engaging! Personally, I’ve found myself clicking through nine out of 10 times, because I’m interested in what else I can learn.

By capitalizing on these searches, you can help determine social media videos and posts to develop that answer gaps in the questions — and even pass them along to your teams to include in blogs and product pages.

Currently, finding these trending topics and questions can be a manual process, but using a tool like AnswerThePublic can help you see potential keywords aggregated into one place. This can help ensure that your strategies are backed by real user intent and data-driven trends rather than assumptions, helping you produce more relevant, discoverable, and high-performing content.

You can take this a step further by leveraging existing SEO and SEM keyword research to inform your social SEO strategy. The same keywords driving paid and organic performance on search engines often reflect audience intent on social media — giving you a strong foundation for content ideation and optimization.

Put your strategy into action for future social media posts with a few best practices:

• Keywords: Weave in keywords you’ve determined from your social media keyword strategy and create posts based on specific questions that are relevant to your audience.
• Alt text and subtitles: Make sure posts have alt text — for both accessibility and search engine understanding — with keywords strategically integrated. Videos should have closed captions, which can be generated by editing auto-captions or uploading an SRT file. This is crucial for accessibility, as roughly 85% of users watch videos with the sound off, and it also helps search engines to index spoken content, making videos discoverable for a wider range of queries.
• Social moderation and listening: Use a tool like Sprout Social to respond to comments and messages, showing platforms that your company is responsive. Additionally, utilizing a social listening platform will help you determine upcoming keywords, trends, and audience pain points, even when you haven’t been mentioned. 

From SEO indexing to igniting your social strategy

The future of B2B is unified, discoverable, and channel-driven: powered by insights from AI SEO, GEO targeting, and integrated keyword strategies that bridge search and social. The competitive advantage is no longer just about creating great content, but about enabling your entire organization — sales, marketing, and channel partners — to become part of the discovery engine.

Ready to further your social strategy? Let’s discuss how we can align your teams and deploy a content ecosystem that turns social indexing into predictable channel revenue.