How Does Social Media Affect SEO?
While social media doesn’t directly improve your SEO ranking, sharing links across all your social media platforms allows you to increase brand exposure. This, in turn, helps to improve your search engine optimization efforts in the following ways:
- Increases online presence and organic traffic
- Improves brand reputation
- Boosts local search engine optimization (SEO)
- Increases brand recognition
- Gives your posts a longer lifespan
- More extensive content distribution
Even though your social media activities have no bearing on SEO rankings, the more your content is shared across social media, the more it sends out signals indicating that your posts are relevant and useful to your target audience.
In a research study conducted by CognitiveSEO, they assessed 23 million social media shares on various platforms and found that there was a close connection between social shares ad SEO. The number of likes, shares, and comments your posts receive sends out crucial signals that the Google algorithm and other search engines use to rank websites.
While links from social media accounts are helpful, as far as the Google algorithm is concerned, they don’t bear a significant bearing as compared to links from other authority sites. However, statistically, the best-ranking pages on search engine results have more social shares.
In the context of how social media affects SEO, Life Marketing has noted that social media doesn’t directly influence SEO. However, it does positively affect search rankings.
Social Media Mentions and Rankings
Gary Illyes, a webmaster trends analyst at Google, had a keynote discussion with SEO Eric Enge. Gary at Pubcon Pro 2017 about how Google may take into account mentions of a brand. Air Social has extensive knowledge and experience across digital marketing, social media advertising, Google Ads, content writing, PR, branding, and SEO which will be helpful to rank on SEO
Thus, it is safe to say that social media success has an influence on your SEO. Google is actively seeking the right metrics, and so should you.
- More Details on How Social Media Supports SEO
- Why social media is important for SEO
- Given that social media is connected to the factors that affect search rankings, it has the ability to generate more quality web traffic to your blog.
By creating and publishing quality materials that are relevant to your target readers, these readers will become your advocates and share your articles with their friends and followers.
If the content is good enough, their friends and followers will do the same, and the cycle continues. Remember, when it comes to digital marketing, content is king. Regardless of the format, provided that your content is engaging, it will draw a lot of traffic. Here are some types of content that drive traffic and social shares:
- Podcasts
- Videos
- Infographics
- Blog posts
This type of content gives your marketing persona useful and relevant information that keeps them coming back for more, which generates more leads. This is known as content marketing (sharing valuable content that is beneficial to the reader). However, even if you create the best quality content, it will be of little use if it isn’t distributed properly. And this is where social media comes in. By sharing your content on social media, your audience amplifies your content by sharing it further. This helps to improve traffic and visibility and generate backlinks.
All these are social signals that tell Google that your site content is useful and in demand, which indirectly improves your search rankings.
SEO social media marketing tips to keep in mind: to help improve your SEO:
- Post relevant and useful material on social media.
- Useful and relevant materials help you to increase your content reach, gain traction, and generate backlinks.
- The better the information provided the better the ranking in search results (grow your followers and drive traffic)
- Quality helps to build your brand community and brand reputation.
- Links from social media accounts help Google with indexing your blogs/posts.
- Indexation help generate more traffic ad improve rankings