Social Media Can And Does Affect Your SEO – Here’s How

social media marketing, seo marketing, social media and seo marketingIn the digital marketing industry, one question that often comes up is “Does social media affect my SEO?”  Yes. It absolutely does. Business owners don’t always feel that social media can do much to grow their business, but that’s not true. In fact, being active on social media is a cheap AND free way to boost your website traffic and drive more potential customers.

There really is such a thing as “social media SEO” – this term refers to how social media activity can affect the organic traffic being driven to your website. Not unlike other types of digital marketing avenues, SEO and social media activities can bolster each other and be lucrative for you.

To be clear, social media does not directly affect SEO. While your activities on different social media platforms may help brand recognition, they don’t directly improve rankings. BUT, when we look further, we do see that social media activities do have an indirect impact on rankings.

The websites that have first position rankings in Google have healthy and active social signals.

Why Doesn’t Google Use Social Signals Directly In Rankings?

Google’s main goal is to provide the best experience to its users. While Google does find value in indexing social media profiles from large platforms like Facebook and Twitter, other features like “shares” and “followers” can be easy to manipulate to cheat the system – resulting in a poorer user experience. To provide the best results, Google ignores some social signals and doesn’t use the data for ranking purposes – but your social media activity does influence the results and that is important for any business owner to know.

To Optimize Your SEO Results Through Social Media – This Is What You Need To Focus On

  1. Posting The Right Kind Of Content – The type of content you publish and publishing it regularly is going to positively impact your content marketing. Your social media posts can get crawled and indexed – and if it’s relevant enough, it will get found in search results. Search engines treat social media content a bit differently than other types of online content – if you can get a blog post to gain much attention on Facebook, it will be indexed faster. You can see this in real-time when a story goes viral on Facebook. If you perform a search for that content, you will see the social media posts show up on the top of search results.
  2. Building Authority – Have you heard that the more space you take up online, the more authority you have? That’s a vague explanation of how your website’s “authority” or “high-value” is built over time as you continue to post content that is valuable and relevant. When you post links on social media that drives traffic back to your website, and those links get shared on social media by other users or in other website blog posts, you are building positive domain authority as this traffic continues to grow.
  3. Social Media Is PersonalSEO is extremely technical. There are keyword density standards, tags, meta descriptions, slugs, alt text and so many more technical details involved in SEO that make it work the way that it does. Even SEO articles are written to be crawled and indexed rather than to be humanized. In today’s world of SEO, having all of the right technical factors isn’t enough because you miss an element of humanity that engages and connects people. Social media allows that to happen. SEO algorithms take into consideration how your website engages people, how they respond to your website and the content on it and what actions they take when they are visiting your site. Maintaining 100% technical satisfaction for SEO will not keep users on your site or make them contact you – social media can help with that. Social media helps you reach the audience that you want to reach and the potential customers that you want to engage with.

Professional Social Media And SEO Marketing In 2020

There is much more to social media and SEO than people often realize. To learn more about the advancements of social media and how your social media presence can help make your company a leading authority online- contact the social media marketing professionals at Get Found First today!