Most businesses know the importance of social media as a standalone entity but ignore its contribution to SEO.
Both SEO and social media marketing target common goals – creating more value for your audience and delivering a high-quality experience.
Since over 3.6 billion people use social media, which is expected to reach 4.41 billion in 2025, social media’s contribution to SEO will likely rise.
Further, the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated technology adoption and changed consumer behaviors. As a result, more businesses are online now, looking for cross-channel sales and conversion mechanisms. Improving your SEO strategy is crucial for better visibility and reach in such scenarios. Thankfully, social media offers a cost-effective method to achieve that.
To improve SEO, do you want to integrate social media into your digital marketing strategy? Are you looking to boost your SEO using social media for better rankings? This article has listed five practical ways social media can benefit SEO.
Is Social Media a Google Ranking Factor?
Social media’s contribution to SEO is a long-standing debate. Though it is clear that social media does not impact SEO rankings directly, it affects some factors. Also, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes, back in 2016, confirmed that Google does not consider social media profiles for rankings but as an organic search result.
Today it is a widespread belief that social signals have a symbiotic relationship with organic SEO rankings. The trend shows the websites ranking at the top of SERPs are likely those with a solid social media presence. Still, the websites have to perform well independently to rank higher.
How Does Social Media Help SEO?
Google does not consider social media as a ranking factor. Though there is no direct correlation between SEO and Social Media, both are intertwined closely. If you are strategizing your SEO, it is crucial to include Social Media.
Here’s why.
1. Content Promotion and Distribution
Social media indirectly improves your search engine rankings through content promotion. Using social media brings higher traffic, engagement, and increased conversions, leading to higher SERP rankings.
You may be creating written, audio, or visual content of excellent quality and investing in optimizing it for the search engine, but it’s useless if no one consumes it. Social media have evolved to be a great search and sharing platform; thus, posting your SEO-based content on multiple channels is the easiest way to attract and engage with a new audience.
The social shares and the incoming links may not impact the other inbound links from high-authority sites. However, more shares, likes, and comments on your post create social signals that indicate the usefulness of your content for the target audience.
This will improve the trustworthiness, bounce rates, and session timings. Google checks the bounce rates while ranking the content, and a higher bounce rate indicates a poor user experience. It also reflects that the content is not helpful for the audience.
Giving your audience a good experience will eventually translate into better search engine metrics, which Google and other search engines use to rank your content. Social media can bring laurels to your content marketing and SEO efforts.
2. Increased Brand Awareness
Next, Social Media builds brand awareness. But, how does the increased brand awareness contribute to SEO? Google’s Search Quality Raters Guideline document claims that a website’s reliability rated by humans considers the brand mentions. Though it does not mean that Google’s algorithm also does the same, the guidelines represent its importance.
Publishing high-quality content consistently not only increases engagement but leads to ever-increasing brand presence. More people will find you, recognize you, and be more inclined to visit your link. More brand mentions create positive sentiment and improve customer satisfaction.
Also, more brand awareness means more branded organic search traffic, which ultimately improves rankings for non-branded keywords.
3. Lead to Quality Link Building
Social media increases your content reach and creates several opportunities. Hardest is to find authentic and high-quality backlinks from high-authority websites. Posting your content on multiple social channels offers a good chance for people to find your content and link it with blogs and websites. This is one of the easiest ways of doing influencer marketing.
Ranking algorithms have evolved, and some quality backlinks are still important for search engines. Thus, building quality inbound links is a must-to-do SEO tactic, for which your social media pages are the perfect playground.
4. Improves Local Engagement
Social media contributes to the local SEO of your website or product. Optimizing your web pages for a local area signals search engines like Google about your local presence and the geographical areas you serve. Search engines sort the SERP results in that best suit the user query using this information.
Marketers usually optimize the website by adding local addresses, regions, and more. Most social platforms have a slot to fill this information. This will indirectly impact your local SEO and populate the SERP page with your link.
Moreover, through social media, create local events and communicate with local communities. Therefore, collaborating with local brands in your area becomes more effortless.
5. Positively Affects Google Indexing
SEO and marketers know the importance of quicker crawling and indexing of the website and page. Faster Google bots read and index your content; more chances of being the first among the competition and gaining better traction. In addition, posting regular, high-quality content on social media improves the indexing time. How?
For example, your post is gaining much attention on social media like Facebook or Twitter; people will eventually search for such content on search engines. Because of social integration, search engines like Google can find your post, and this way, your pages get indexed faster.
Conclusion
A robust social media presence works in favor of your website’s SEO and SERP rankings. You cannot beat the cost-effectiveness and high return that this tactic provides to your SEO strategy. In addition, social media is an invaluable tool for creating brand awareness or digital marketing and sales.
Simple chronology says that the more traffic you get on your social media platform, the more the website traffic will be. Also, leverage Google’s relationship with Twitter to increase organic reach.