Customers are on social networks to communicate with friends, family and research the products and services they are interested in. Customer are searching engines, clicking through online ads, and sharing on social networks. Social media is influencing search. Search and social are more connected than ever before. In fact, eMarketer recently published some data from comScore that found that clickthrough rates increased 94% when a consumer was exposed to both brand-specific search results and social media. Here are 3 steps your business can take for more successful social media search optimization.

Create Fresh, Relevant Content

New content will boost both your social presence and your SEO (search engine optimization) efforts. Studies have shown that fresh, relevant content will influence purchasers and great content on your site will help your business with its search engine rankings. Brafton created an infographic that summarized the studies of a few different organizations. They concluded that 61% of consumers are more likely to purchase goods from businesses that offer custom content and 57% of marketers have acquired new customers via their blogs. If your business is creating great content on a regular basis, you’ll encourage those who come across to share it on social networks which will make your social media and search efforts more optimized.

Share What You Have and Know

You want to be an authority in your niche so that others are likely to share what your sharing with them. Search engines are using social signals in how they index and rank pages. Bing uses Facebook Likes as a ranking signal for logged in users. Google says it is working on using +1 as a ranking signal and tweets help Google index content faster. You can just create great content and hope others share it – you need to share it as well. Ask family, friends, customers and clients to tweet and share your content! Visuals are making more of an impact so be sure your posts and content are visually stunning and easily shared. Share what your team knows and make sure those that you’re pushing it to are the right audience.

Measure Your Results

As you create and share content, track what signals you’re receiving from your customers and target audience. Marketers are well aware of the need to prove that their efforts are worth the increasing costs it takes to be successful. Social content success should be a part of your SEO strategy. You need to think about how your SEO efforts will perform socially and if they will fare poorly, it may be time for you to sit down and reevaluate your current strategy. Create content with search engines and social media users in mind and measure how individual posts and types of content do so you can further redefine your strategy.

Your social media presence and efforts will impact your search engine results. Posts, social profiles and more should all incorporate the keywords your business is currently going after. eMarketer also found that buyers who purchase or convert online are almost as likely to use a combination of search and social resources (48%) as they are to use just search (51%) along the path to purchase. Social and search will continue to become more intertwined – perhaps until they are synonymous – and you need to be prepared.

Author Bio: Erica is a SME tech copywriter for small business resource Business.com. Erica Bell covers a range of topics including online marketing automation and social media trends. Find Business.com on Twitter!