Social media and SEO have the same goal – both want to increase traffic to your website. This in turn means both should work together to get that result.
However, Social Media and SEO have a somewhat unclear and complicated relationship.
There’s an active correlation between social media shares and higher ranking on search engines.
Yet SEO success from social media is due to the quality of the content as opposed to it performing well on the algorithm.
You need your social media to perform well (from likes, comments and shares) for it to have any effect on SEO.
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Social SEO refers to the idea that social media interactions and backlinks play a considerable role in a website’s search engine rankings.
Therefore through the use of social SEO social media becomes an indirect tool to increase your search visibility and organic search ranking.
Although there’s a lot of debate as to how much social media can affect SEO. It appears the two major search engines, Google and Bing have conflicting reports when it comes to social media and search engine ranking.
The former head of webspam at Google – Matt Cutts – has suggested that shares and likes do not directly affect ranking on Google but they indirectly contribute to a better ranking due to more people seeing the content.
He said, “as far as doing any special work to say that you have this many followers on Twitter or this many likes on Facebook, to the best of my knowledge, we don’t currently have any signals like that in our web search ranking algorithm.”
Whilst also suggesting that social media can have a positive correlation with search engine ranking but is not the causation of this.
“We see a lot of links on Facebook and those are the pages that rank well. But that’s correlation. That’s not causation. Instead it’s probably that there’s something really awesome, and because there’s something awesome, then it gets a lot of likes on Facebook and a lot of people decide to link to it.”
On the other hand according to Bing’s webmaster guidelines social media engagement directly affects the ranking on their search engine.
One thing is clear however that even if social media and SEO don’t directly affect each other, if utilized efficiently, they will bring more traffic to your website.
How Social Media affects SEO
Social media is such a powerful tool that everyone should be using. It’s great for you to build your brand awareness and to direct targeted traffic to your website.
You have the potential to drive people back to your website from the engaging content that you are uploading to social media.
This is why social media can indirectly affect SEO and your search rankings. When your audience shares your content they then pass it on to their friends who may also share it passing it on to more people, the cycle can be endless.
This will then increase your visibility online and people may start to backlink to your content due to the number of social signals (shares, likes and comments) you are getting.
These social signals notify the search engines that your platforms are engaging and can indirectly improve your ranking result.
SEO will then in turn love this as you are getting more organic traffic and people are starting to talk about your website.
Social media mainly affects SEO due to its ability to gain you a wider audience. However, it is the quality of your content that is the most important.
Social media is so widely used these days that it is often how people first come across your business, they will make a judgement of your company based upon your social media content.
This is why quality content is so important. You need to make content that will engage with your audience, it needs to be adapted so that they will like, comment and share.
Social media and SEO correlate, but you have to create and post quality content for the correlation to be positive.
The more shares and engagement your content receives the higher you will rank on the search engine.
For social media to positively affect your SEO, you need to increase your audience and direct them to your website.
Best Social Media To Use For Your Business
Firstly you need to know what social media platforms out there are best for your business and best to increase traffic.
Youtube
Behind Google, Youtube is the most popular platform on the internet. Youtube can be such a vital tool for your business to promote and advertise what you do.
We’re moving into a society where video and images often are more engaging therefore making Youtube a natural choice for your social media plan.
Facebook is great for your business as the site is easy to use and made simple to share your online content. Google now crawls and indexes Facebook, meaning that searches on Facebook will show up on the search engine results page.
Similar to Facebook, Twitter is great for increasing your social signals and getting your content seen and shared. Successful tweets on Twitter are short, snappy and engaging, make sure not to go too detailed. Make use of hashtags and use engaging images.
LinkedIn is quickly becoming one of the most effective social media platforms, especially for marketing your business.
LinkedIn is the content marketing hub of 94% of B2B marketers. And almost 90% of marketers are using the platform for lead generation. 62% of B2B leads come from LinkedIn.
Instagram is an interesting platform, it’s often home to the hipsters and influencers of the world but is still one of the most effective social media platforms out there.
Similarly to Twitter, you need to use strategic hashtags to get your content seen. Other avenues that work well on Instagram are using stories and going live where you can communicate with your followers.
To learn more about how and what you should be posting on these platforms have a look at our previous blog.
7 Ways To Increase Social Media Traffic
Create High Quality Engaging Content
You need to produce engaging content that your audience wants to see. Without good content, everything else on your social media will fail. If your audience isn’t reacting to your posts no one will see them and it won’t get a chance to work with SEO.
Spending the time to make sure your content is good is more important than SEO and Social Media combined.
Share And Promote Your Content
Get your audience, friends, family, colleagues, cats and dogs to share posts, share your content multiple times across all your social media outlets. This gives you the best chance to push your new content out there so it can be seen by new people.
Cross-platform sharing can be a great tool for you to use, don’t just post something on one channel get your content out there on every social media outlet that you have. You can post something more than once, just make sure it’s not the exact same post.
Let your content be seen.
Optimize Your Social Media Profiles
Much like your website content, Social Media needs to be optimized to increase your online presence. This is where SEO and Social Media work together and why they should be aligned.
Social Media is a gateway to your website and business, this is why when optimizing you need to follow the same format as your web. This should mean that people will start to recognize your brand if you are following similar techniques.
Optimize Your Images
The online world is very visual, especially on social media. You have platforms like Instagram that work solely from posting photos.
Your images need to be a striking point to get traffic on social media, people don’t want to read large chunks of texts- you need to grab their attention with an eye-catching image.
Talk And Listen To Your Audience
This is a great way to keep you in the loop with your audience, you will have no better way of understanding what they want by communicating with them directly.
You can use comments sections on posts, introduce a live chat on your website, Q&A sessions on Instagram and you can go live on any social media.
Engaging with your audience on this scale is an effective way to become more authentic and approachable, they get to see you on a more personal level. Increasing engagement in this way is also great for SEO as it gets people talking about and sharing your social media.
Have A Social Media Strategy
An effective social media strategy enables you to improve SEO and rank higher with search engines. Social media is all about engaging with your audience, if you do this successfully the more likely you will rank higher.
Social media plays a huge role in helping get your content in front of a larger audience, understanding effective social media and SEO strategies is key to engaging with and widening your audience.
Research Your Target Audience
Knowing your audience is key for online content. This is where SEO helps play a big part, it allows you to use the analytics to see what type of content works and what does not.
There’s no point in putting content out there that your audience won’t engage with, that’s not good for SEO or social media. It’s also a waste of time.
Know what engages your audience to interact with your content. If you increase your social shares you will in turn increase your SEO ranking.
Social media and SEO need to be aligned to have a successful and increasing online presence.
Some say social media directly impacts SEO – others say that it indirectly affects SEO.
What is clear is that both go hand in hand to work as part of a team that increases traffic to your website. If your social media is gaining views and hits it will improve your SEO, gaining you places in that all-important race to the number one slot on the search engine results page.
But remember the foundations for success in SEO and social media start with great content.
Andrew Wright
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