Hey Reader!
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My new podcast with the legendary Ray Saddiq is now live on YouTube 💪

Ray Saddiq, from The Social Diary, has very quickly become the social search guy.

He started out his career in social media, increasing organic followings and views, selling Instagram accounts and creating trending content strategies.

In 2020, he started transitioning to the world of SEO, merging his background in social media marketing with his passion for all-around brand growth.

Since then, Ray has worked with big names like Monzo Bank, The Body Shop and HomeServe to grow their digital organic channels. And it doesn't stop there - Ray is currently the Global Head Of Marketing + SMT at Rise at Seven.

In our chat, we cover 👇

• The current state of SEO and what the future of search looks like.
• The link between SEO and social media and how the two can work simultaneously in organic marketing.
• How to come up with content ideas for your social media channels.
• How to effectively employ a social media and SEO strategy.
• The secrets to effectively extracting lived experiences from an industry expert to distribute on social media.
• Some rapid-fire questions on Ray’s personal experience in the industry.

Key takeaways

• The fear and negativity surrounding the current state of SEO all stem from one key aspect: Insecurity. However, SEO has the potential to be more in demand than ever.
• Search isn’t going away - it’s expanding. People are just searching via different platforms for their answers. We’ve become a lot more critical in our thinking and aren’t just making a decision based on one Google search. We’ll look at TikTok, Instagram, Reddit and X all before we turn to Google.
• There’s a massive organic link between SEO and social media marketing, providing the opportunity for an aligned marketing strategy. A social media post may only have a lifetime of 72 hours, but there’s an element of search involved in the process that can still lead to revenue, traffic and leads months or years down the line.
• Focus on social media marketing while your SEO strategy gets up and running. This sets you up to be in a more established, authoritative position when your SEO efforts do start to bear fruit, making it easier to rank.
• If you’re a company founder, here are a couple of ways you can come up with social media content ideas:
  • Cover topics around questions your customers ask you.
  • Produce in-depth content around the FAQs on your website.
  • Share your internal team processes and mention how they could be beneficial to other businesses in your industry.
  • Discuss industry-specific publications from your perspective.
  • Leverage your employees and personal branding, on platforms like LinkedIn, to build a level of brand authority that other types of content can’t.
  • Experiment with different delivery formats - video, text, images and carousels.
• SEO vs social media strategy: Which comes first?
  • Start with building your long-form content strategy first - blog posts, podcasts and YouTube videos.
  • Then adapt your long-form content to suit the narrative format of the platform where you’ll be posting it. In other words, don’t distribute - contribute. Spread out your repurposed content over your content calendar to ensure maximum engagement - don’t post it all simultaneously.
• To develop a social media strategy:
  • Use a notes app or Notion to jot down any content ideas as they come up.
  • Set up an evergreen content map based on customer pain points. This map should include your research and content ideas.
  • Develop a time frame to action these ideas - monthly, weekly, etc.
  • Incorporate time to address treading topics as they come about.
• How to extract lived experiences for social content:
  • Conduct in-depth research on the industry and the type of content currently produced across various platforms in that niche.
  • Look at the competitors on social media and note the type of content they’re producing.
  • Ensure you have a good enough understanding of the industry to hold a conversation about it.
  • Compile your research into a learning map.
  • Go through the information with the industry expert. Discuss their customer profile, brand, mission, values and wider strategy.
  • Conduct keyword research based on your audience analysis and research.

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Chat soon,

Craig