When it comes to expanding your business, most businesses realize that search engine optimization is a must-have marketing strategy. Fewer still realize the potential of social media for growth.
As well as the fact that it’s easier than ever, search engine optimization is a fantastic tool for boosting your business. What’s more, what often goes unnoticed is social media SEO’s incredible power.
I often hear, “we don’t do social media; we don’t see the value in it,” during web design client kick-offs. That viewpoint needs to be altered! Social media should definitely be a component of your digital plan, and it all comes down to how you integrate it with SEO.
What is Social Media SEO?
The technique of combining social media and SEO techniques to improve search rankings is known as social networking and optimization (SEO).
Establishing a blog for your company or brand is a great alternative to Facebook advertising. However, because blog posts are published on a regular basis and people expect new material on the internet site, it’s important to create content that can deliver.
Neither should exist in a vacuum, and neither should be expected to perform it all when it comes to improving search engine results pages (SERPs).
Under the banner of a smart, data-driven digital marketing plan, social media and SEO are integrated into a complete marketing ecosystem. The combined efforts and shared data may improve conversions and your ROI significantly — and that’s great business.
How Does Social Media Affect SEO?
Here are five major ways social media impacts SEO:
- Search rankings — Social signals have a big impact on important quality and activity data for your website, which are used by search algorithms. Different weights are assigned to social signals by Bing and Yahoo (powered by Bing).
- Content amplification — Beyond organic reach, we may help your website’s content find new and returning visitors by optimizing it for SEO.
- Brand awareness — Your content is a valuable tool for achieving results on social media. Using humanized social media content,
- Link building — Backlinks assist SEO-friendly inbound links (backlinking) to be created once your material is seen and published on other sites.
- Local SEO —The goal of every small business is to increase their local presence and ranking through company profile data and client reviews.
These elements all have a complex network of social signals that influence your website’s search rankings. This is why social media SEO is so important for firms of all types and sectors.
Fact: Your competitors’ social media profiles may appear in search engine results for your company, sometimes right beneath your website.
Fact: The majority of social media posts are indexed by search engines, which means they’ll appear in search for your company and can also show up in results for particular queries.
Google may be the search overlord, but did you know that YouTube — a social media platform — is the second largest search engine in the world? That’s right: more people conduct searches on YouTube than on Yahoo or Bing.
Your potential and existing consumers aren’t the only ones looking for information on other social platforms before making purchases.
Social media and search rankings: What are social signals?
The data that your website captures from exposure on social media sites, which are processed by search engine algorithms and incorporated into content ranking, are known as social signals.
- Likes and comments
- Shares
- Votes/pins
- Links
- Reviews
- Mentions and followings
A social signal is similar to a vote for your content. While Google’s 200+ ranking criteria don’t place much value on social signals, the traffic and interaction they bring do have an impact on your search rank.
Fresh domains that have little to no backlinks might need much more work. In addition, mentions and audience size are considered when evaluating domain authority — a crucial ranking element.
Social signals impact a variety of ranking elements, including boosting reach and brand awareness, gaining backlinks, and improving site authority. This is why social media SEO is so important.
Extend your reach, grow your audience: Social amplification
In a perfect world, each time you released a new piece of writing it would appear on Google’s first page, and everyone would like it.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Because of the abundance of material noise, customers are assaulted on all fronts.
The top results are dominated from search ads to high-authority rivals and content publishing platforms, and ranking may seem like an impossible task. Even a well-planned keyword strategy will not drive traffic on its own.
Six ways social media SEO boosts your marketing efforts:
- Faster indexing by search engines
- Acquiring immediate traffic to your content
- Building your audience and potential for future traffic
- Reaching a targeted audience already interested in your content
- Driving traffic to older, still-useful content
- Increasing returning visitors
The more people who visit your website, the more possibilities you have to improve your position using other important ranking signals: content quality and user engagement.
nThat’s a lot of traffic if your blog piece is shared by numerous individuals on three social networks, with hundreds of people from each of those individual networks reading it and passing it along to their own friends — that’s a significant amount.
That is some SEO magic right there if your material encourages high-quality ranking signals from all of those visitors (longer session durations, viewing more than one page per session, low bounce rate).
Not to mention the fact that, as a result of all these people learning about your brand, there’s the potential for them to become return visitors, share future material, and link to your content from other websites — but more on backlinks later.
The same can be said for social media traffic in terms of detrimental impact on your ranking. Misleading headlines, low-quality content, slow page load speeds, and a difficult user interface may all contribute to negative signals.
It’s crucial to start with the basics: relevance, usefulness, and quality. Always keep these principles in mind when creating content so that people who discover it on social media like and engage with it.
Brand awareness is SEO love
Your company must be recognized in order to expand. You can’t attract new consumers if they never hear about you, whether you run a local brick-and-mortar business or an international brand.
SEO helps your website get found online through paid and organic keyword strategies and other onsite optimization. Social media marketing takes it to the next level.
- There is a phenomenon called “social proof”! The studies reveal that people trust recommendations from friends, family, influencers, and online reviews.
- Organic social media efforts and influencer marketing are two of the most important methods to help your firm acquire a following.
- The more familiar clients are with your company through social proof, the more likely they are to think of you when they need your product or service.
The reason the importance of genuine brand storytelling through social media is so significant right now is that today’s savvy customer does their homework.
According to Social Media Today, a photo of someone they know or respect using your product is 11 times more likely to convert than other types of marketing.
So, how does this relate to social media SEO? It all boils down to traffic once again. Increased knowledge of your firm through social media equates to more visits to your website and an improved conversion possibility.
The manner that people interact with your material after they arrive at your website matters a lot.
How to turn brand awareness into conversions:
Make sure they have an excellent user experience whether they come upon you via an Instagram tag on an influencer’s post or one of your blog articles shared on their friend’s profile.
- Ensure that all of your social media traffic is sending the proper ranking signals by having fully customized accounts on the appropriate social networks for your target audience to discover.
- Keep your message on track – the style and tone in all of your material should pique the interest of your ideal consumer, wherever they discover you.
- Stay on top of your website design! Social visitors bounce from slow, clunky websites, which is a negative indication you don’t want.
- Check that all of your landing pages are working to guide the buyer through their buying process: callouts to related content, easy navigation, and simple next actions.
Social media for bigger, better link building
Backlinks are a well-known and successful search ranking factor. That’s why most SEO tools keep track of the present backlinks on your website, flag any problematic ones for correction, and offer suggestions for potential new connections.
Backlinks are essential for a website’s success. Backlinks, also known as inbound links, are fantastic things. Search engines consider a website to be more popular and relevant if it has more healthy backlinks.
Backlinks aren’t generated by social media per se, but the use of brand awareness and increased reach can result in more backlinks.
As new people discover your brand and its content, the opportunity for inbound links grows.
Several of the links included in this blog were fantastic material I save for later use on social media. By including them in this post, I’m pointing traffic to that information.
Once again, social media SEO magic at work!
Negative backlinks are a ranking factor that, like other rankings factors, you need to be cautious about. While high-authority websites linking to your site are beneficial for SEO, links from low-quality or spammy sites can drag you down.
It’s a good idea to use an SEO tool or engage an SEO partner to keep track of your website’s backlinks.
How social media affects local SEO
Local SEO is essential in some industries — like hospitality, dining, and entertainment — and for small businesses.
Whether it’s a typical search or a voice inquiry, you want your business to show up on the first page when someone in your region is looking for what you offer.
The most crucial SEO box to check is that your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) are correctly recorded on your website, in relevant company directories, and on all of your social media profiles in order for your site to appear in local search results.
Four tips to use social media for local SEO
- Populate your NAP, website, hours, and an optimized business description on social media platforms — The user’s geographic location is used by search engines to pick results in a certain query location or the user’s geographical location.
- Ensure your Google My Business listing is correctly populated — People that aren’t signed in will not be shown right below search results, but rather to the right.
- Encourage reviews — Expert opinion: Experts believe social signals, such as Yelp, Facebook, TripAdvisor, and most importantly Google reviews, account for 13% of ranking factors in local search results.
- Nurture your following — The number of likes, comments, and shares give you a better idea than the amount of followers you have. You can’t disregard social signals when it comes to audience development!
Bonus tips! 4 quick ways to optimize your social media
- Use keywords in your business description and bios
- Use keywords or questions/phrases in your post copy
- Have a video optimization strategy for naming and tagging videos
- Use hashtags to extend your reach to the right audience
Social media is more than just baby pictures and memes. For corporations, it’s a chance to create a community, humanize your brand, and raise both your message and work – all while complementing organic and paid search efforts.
We hope you’re now completely convinced of the power of social media SEO. We wish you good luck with your optimization efforts!