An active social media presence is an excellent way to engage with your customers and reach your target audience. And it can also lead to 2 to 5% conversions when used as a marketing channel.
But did you know that it can also improve your SEO results?
If you are looking for ways to improve your SEO, you should consider social media. The following guide will highlight how social media affects SEO and offer a few tips and best practices.
How Social Media Affects SEO Rankings
Social media does not have a direct impact on SEO rankings. But this does not mean that it is not an important part of the equation. Social media channels, along with likes, shares, and comments, send social signals indicating that your posts are relevant to your audience.
Social media makes it easy for people to find your content. The easier it is for people to find your content, the more time they will spend on it, and the more important it will appear to Google. It’s a win all around.
Here is a detailed look at the 10 ways social media can improve your SEO rankings:
1. Increased Brand Awareness
When generating leads and converting sales, you need people to be aware of your brand. Social media allows businesses to create brand awareness in any industry or market.
Share brand updates, sales, industry news, whatever makes sense for your business and audience. The more relevant, engaging, or entertaining the content, the more likely your audience will share it.
Social media acts like word-of-mouth marketing, spreading awareness through online social networks.
2. Expand Your Target Audience
Traditional marketing and media can limit the reach of your brand. You might not reach as many people as you can through social media.
If you offer a service or a product that isn’t limited to a specific geographical area, social media provides an excellent opportunity to reach a larger target audience. Social media channels have a global reach, so there is no telling who will see your content once it is posted.
3. Opportunities to Acquire Backlinks
The more people that see your content, the more likely you are to gain all-important backlinks.
It is well established that quality backlinks from authoritative sites are excellent for SEO. They signal to search engines that the content being linked to is valuable.
While social media shares don’t count directly as backlinks, they do provide more opportunities for people to see your posts and, therefore, more opportunities for people to find your content and link to it.
4. Build Brand Trust
An active social media presence allows your brand to connect with your target audience. It is a place where you can highlight your products and services, obviously, but also a place to highlight your brand persona.
With social media, you can connect more intimately with your audience. Whether you make them laugh, blow their minds, touch their hearts, educate them, or some combination, followers will develop a relationship with your brand. And this relationship will grow into trust and make them more likely to purchase from you when they need your offering.
Social media presence also helps new customers or clients verify the legitimacy of your brand. If you have an active and engaged social media profile, they at least know that you are not a fly-by-night operation.
5. Boost Content Performance
Content published on your website is great. But unless you share it on your social media channels, it is likely just going to sit there, doing nothing. You want people to see and read your content; social sharing can help.
Social media can get your content in front of more people than you might otherwise be able to reach. Certainly, you want organic search traffic, but depending on the keywords you are targeting, the search volume for those terms, and the industry’s competitiveness, your content may be like a drop in the ocean.
Shares and click-throughs from social media will help more people notice your content and indirectly signal search engines that your content is of value.
6. Increased Website Traffic
The goal of SEO is to get your content to the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs). This is critical as statistics show that only 25% of users bother to check page 2 of the SERPs. But reaching that top position can be very difficult. Remember, everyone that publishes content has the same ranking goal.
Social media is a way to get people to your page without having to secure the top position. Most people are on social media, and you can likely reach your target audience. Furthermore, SEO techniques can take months to work. These techniques are important and effective, but they may not bring you the traffic you were hoping for immediately. Social media posts are a way around this.
7. Profiles Can Rank for Search Terms
Social media profiles often rank for branded search terms. They may even rank for other terms related to your brand.
When individuals search for your brand, your social channels may appear along with your website. While most people will look for your site, some users may want to check out your online presence through social media.
Social media presents a different look at your brand, potentially creating a more intimate connection with users.
8. Enables Local Engagement
For brands that have a brick-and-mortar location and sell services or products in a specific geographic area, social media can help increase local engagement.
Social media is an excellent way to target local customers with sales, events, and announcements. Not only can you use local keywords to improve the likelihood of your posts showing up in the SERPs, but you can also actually target social media ads to your region.
9. Improve Ranking Signals
Ranking signals are used by search engines to sort content based on relevance and quality. Loosely, they measure how frequently a URL appears across the web. Now that so much online activity transpires through social media, search engines have included social signals as a part of their ranking signals.
Again, while search ranking and social media are not directly linked, a comprehensive social media strategy can improve social signals and increase a brand’s ranking factors.
10. Attract Relationships With Influencers
Influencers are all over social media. And they often find, share, and amplify brands or posts they like, making them go viral. If you aren’t on social media, you cannot take advantage of this opportunity.
Some influencers sell promotions. It is possible that you can strike a working relationship with an influencer, garnering reach and attention for your brand that would otherwise be impossible.
The larger your social presence, the more likely it is that an influencer will either notice your brand or want to start a business relationship with you.
Social Media Best Practices For Increasing SEO Rankings
As with SEO and blogging, social media requires a little bit of effort. You will have to develop a strategy; it doesn’t need to be complex and follow a few simple best practices.
Here are some best practices for increasing SEO rankings through social media.
Produce High-Quality Content
Over the years, search engine algorithms have evolved to recognize search intent, sentiment, and relevance. This means that high-quality content is an important part of ranking.
Gone are the days when you can stuff keywords all over the page and see results. You need to provide posts that are informed and informative, useful, entertaining, or otherwise valuable to your target audience.
Optimize Your Social Profiles & Images
If you want your social profiles to impact your SEO positively, you need to optimize them. Optimizing a profile is a little different than optimizing blog posts or images. You want your profiles to be discoverable, but you also want them to send a consistent brand message.
Make sure all of your profiles are consistent and that they align with your blog and your website. This will help people find you across a range of channels and indicates a connection that Google will notice and promote.
Images play a significant role in digital marketing. The human brain can process images 60,000x faster than it can process text and retains 80% of the images it sees compared to 20% text retention.
But to maximize the impact of images on your social media channels, you need to optimize them within your posts. Add keywords to the alt text, choose the right image formats, and keep the files small to ensure good load times.
When posting an image to social, choose appropriate and engaging captions with your keywords. And above all else, make sure the images are high quality!
Share Your Content
To use social media to your advantage, you must create shareable content. It is not enough to simply post (although it does help!), you need content that people are interested in and willing to share with their friends and networks.
All posts should have engaging headlines, strong images or video, and be relatable to your audience.
The more your content is shared, the more quality backlinks you can acquire. Over time, this will improve your SEO rankings.
It is also a good idea to encourage employees to follow your profiles and share your posts on their own timelines.
Increase Audience Engagement
Social media is a great way to connect and engage with your audience. Engagement can help you build trust and establish credibility. To boost audience engagement, you, as a brand, need to be engaged.
The more you interact with your profile, the more positive people will feel about your brand, and the more positivity will spread, leading to social shares and, ultimately, page visits.
Increase engagement by responding to comments, asking questions, running contests, creating polls, and asking for feedback.
Grow Your Followers
Brand awareness is an essential part of brand growth. By creating a solid social media strategy, posting valuable content, engaging with your audience, and even devoting a small budget to social media advertising, you can grow your followers.
Growth should always be a part of your social media strategy. With 4.62 billion global social media users, there is always room for more followers. The more followers you can attract, the more shares you are likely to obtain, and the more traffic to your website.
Which Social Media Sites are Best for SEO?
Some social media sites are better for improving SEO results than others. Users will often research a brand by searching social media sites. If you follow SEO best practices and the tips in this post, your profile is likely to show up in a search result.
You may find that your brand and your content are more successful on some sites than on others. If, for example, you are a corporate brand, you may be more likely to find your audience on LinkedIn, but that does not mean you should not have a Twitter profile. Profiles on multiple channels allow you to increase awareness and ensure you are hitting as much of your audience as possible.
Here are some of the top social media sites for SEO:
LinkedIn is a popular site for marketers and B2B brands. Because it is primarily a professional network, LinkedIn is an excellent source of new leads for B2B.
It is also great for improving SEO as LinkedIn profiles often appear in Google search results. Naturally place keywords throughout your profile, and include strategic or secondary keywords in your posts, and you could start appearing in the SERPs.
Meta
Meta social media sites include Facebook and Instagram. Both can be a significant benefit. Facebook is the top social media platform in the world, and Instagram is perfect for brands looking for a visual branding opportunity.
Facebook allows users to interact easily and share content. And back in 2015, Facebook allowed Google to crawl and index some of its pages. It has since opened up more content to being indexed, including comments. So, when seeking easy-to-improve SEO social media, Facebook is a great place to start.
When it comes to Instagram, branding opportunities are nearly endless. If you are in the fashion, fitness, beauty, or wellness industry, you are likely already aware of the power of marketing on Instagram. Because you cannot share links directly in your Instagram posts, remember to update your profile with the proper links or use a platform like Linktree to help followers find your site and more of your content.
Twitter can provide Google with the powerful social signals you need to move up the SERPs. To increase your success on Twitter, ensure everything you post is valuable and engaging. You can link your blogs, products, industry insights, company updates, or whatever makes sense. But try to avoid appearing spammy. You want to tweet regularly, but you don’t want to appear as a bot.
And don’t forget the hashtags. Hashtags can help people find your content more easily, increasing links and retweets, and creating those all-important social signals.
YouTube
According to Statista, as of January 2022, YouTube has 2.6 billion monthly active users. The only social media site with more monthly active users is Facebook. And video is continuing to grow in popularity.
Depending on your brand, you can create vlogs, product tutorials or demonstrations, video guides, and more. Be creative, and be yourself.
To improve SEO, be strategic in your titles and your video descriptions. YouTube has the second largest search engine (behind Google), so keywords and content relevancy will play an important role on this platform.
Quora
Quora is a question-and-answer site. Users pose questions on a wide range of topics, and other users can answer.
Quora provides a unique opportunity to showcase your topical authority and thought leadership. It is also a way to link back to your brand and your services.
There are several ways to use Quora for improved SEO. Start by including keywords in your profile and bio. Then you can get to work answering questions that pertain to your expertise. Quora questions, and by extension, their answers, often appear in Google search results.
Quora is also a great tool for identifying keywords your audience is using, gaps in your content strategy, and key trends in your industry.
Whatever industry you’re in, Reddit has a space for you. With over a billion monthly visitors and free access, it is an often overlooked tool in your SEO toolbox.
The key to Reddit is to be an active participant in the community. And this means doing so in a way that is not self-promotional. We know it seems counterintuitive, but it is a part of the guidelines established by the platform.
Create an account and find the subreddits that apply to you. Respond to threads and share your expertise. Communicate advice without attempting to sell your services. Be transparent about who you are and where you work. The more active you are without promoting yourself, the more trust and authority you can build.
Using keywords in your posts will help them become discoverable by Google and increase the likelihood that they will appear in the SERPs.
Like many of the other social media platforms on this site, Pinterest functions as a search engine. And many of the onsite searches are unbranded, which means that Pinterest users are often engaging with brands they aren’t necessarily familiar with.
The key to SEO success through Pinterest is to optimize your profile and your pins. In doing so, you can drive searches to your site, improving traffic. Optimizing pins is also how you will help them appear in searches outside the platform.
Improving Your SEO With Social Media
Understanding how to improve SEO with social media means understanding your brand and target audience.
While SEO and social media are not directly linked, they have an indirect connection. Find out which platforms are most popular with your audience and those that make the most sense for your brand persona (i.e., LinkedIn vs. Pinterest) and get started.
If all of this still feels beyond your capabilities, you can hire a professional team to manage things for you. At WDK, we offer both SEO services and Social Media Management. Our team has a deep understanding of this landscape and can help you improve and grow your online presence.
Social media provides your brand with unique opportunities to excel. Do not miss out; contact us today to get started.
Additional Resources:
- Does Changing Theme Affect SEO?
- What Industries need SEO the most?
- 4 Types of Digital Marketing and how to use them
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