Influence of Social Media on SEO

Business owners may be curious about social media’s direct influence on search engine optimisation (SEO) for businesses. We finally have a definitive answer to the long debate about whether social media affects SEO.

The two are not directly connected, but they can work together in various ways.

The primary effect of SEO is that it brings more visibility to your brand and content to drive more traffic. As well as social networks, you can rank YouTube videos on regular search results as well. Optimising them for SEO will boost your overall SEO strategy.

Here are some influences of social media on search engine optimization. Read this article to find out how to use social media strategy to impact SEO and vice versa. You can use these social media SEO strategies to improve your Google search rankings today.

Table of Contents

Rank Building

Google states social media does not impact on search ranking, but surveys and data indicate it can help your site rank better. What’s the truth?

Google has repeatedly said social signals are not a direct ranking factor. But just because Google said that social isn’t a ranking factor doesn’t mean that it doesn’t affect rankings.

According to this article, Searchmetrics’ 2016 Rebooting Ranking Factors White Paper: “The correlation between social signals and ranking position is extremely high, and the number of social signals per landing page has remained constant compared to the values from last year’s whitepaper. The top-ranked websites in Google display more social signals than all other pages. It is primarily because of the overlap between brand websites performing strongly in social networks and being allocated top positions by Google.”

Schedule a free call if you need digital marketing or social strategy assistance to improve your online visibility and social media presence. Click To Tweet

So, from the above, we can see some correlation or relationship between them. With Google’s Panda algorithm, quality content like a trending video from social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and X (Twitter) often ranks high in Google search results.

The rank building shows that if you have a substantial social media presence on these social platforms, it will be of help to your SEO efforts.

Traffic Building

This article notes that historically, we have always considered traffic as one of the significant ranking factors. You can increase traffic and visibility to your site through social media.

The larger your following on social media, the higher the opportunity for you to build a thriving community of loyal brand advocates.

When your piece of content is shared on a social media channel, this will increase your website’s traffic which you can measure using Google Analytics or similar analytics tools. The more traffic to your site, the better your chances on social media.

But this boils down to you providing great content. Doing otherwise and providing shoddy content might hurt your rankings in the long run.

So you do well to optimise your social media profile to ensure you keep driving targeted traffic to your website.

Social media profiles play an important role in brand building and recognition. A good social media account can drive significant traffic to your site.

Social media SEO boosts your website's organic traffic by using social media activities. Click To Tweet

Link Building

Google treats Facebook and X (Twitter) pages like any other pages in their web index. So if anything occurs on Facebook or X (Twitter), Google can crawl it and return it in their search results.

Search engines, like Google, could mark links published on social media as credible backlinks, influencing a page’s ranking despite the authority of a social account. Source: https://neilpatel.com/blog/social-media-and-seo/

The more social media shares you have on your blog post, the more opportunities your larger audience has to see your content and link to it. But for social sharing to affect rankings, it needs to increase visibility among content creators and those who found the type of content so helpful they attached to it.

Use social share and promote your content since it increases the likelihood of other websites referring and linking to your site or content.

A critical signal that Google uses to rank your content in its search results is the number of other credible websites that link to your visual content. And before other websites can know your content exists in the first place, you can get the word out through social media.

When you post content and your social media followers find it valuable, they link to it from their website, which will benefit you.

Link building is why you must create valuable content for your blog readers and audience on social media.

There may not be a direct correlation between social signals and SEO, but there are ways in which social signals influence your SEO. Your social media effort indirectly affects SEO rankings. Click To Tweet

Increasing the number of quality backlinks to your website from other credible sites is one of the best things you can do to improve your SEO.

Inbound links are an essential element that significantly impacts a website’s authority. Although social media posts may not directly impact SEO, they can provide ample link building opportunities. Building a brand with social media sites is about building relationships, which is no different when trying to get links. Your link building efforts can be multiplied by using social media.

Brand Building

According to Statista, Facebook is the most extensive social network worldwide, with over 2.7 billion monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2020. This shows how important social media has become for generating brand awareness. Thus, you do well to regularly engage with your audience on social media by starting discussions, asking questions and commenting on news and other trending content.

With many people and brands accessing social media on mobile devices, some dubious persons may try to impersonate your personal or business brands through various tactics.

So, you must regularly take part in social media to make it possible for people to distinguish your original profiles from the fakes. It will also help your community identify your products and services through the relevant keywords and hashtags you use in your tweets and posts.

It is also necessary for you to remove duplicate social profiles. The more social media activity your content receives (in the form of comments, likes, shares, retweets, and reviews), the better your brand authority.

The increased engagement on your content will affect your brand awareness, leading to expanded word of mouth about your brand.

Brand exposure is increased through social media, but social media has no direct impact on SEO. Social media indirectly influences SEO rankings, although not directly affecting them. Click To Tweet

The effect of all this will also translate to more people searching for your brand online and improving your rankings on the search engines.

Although social media content does not directly influence search engine rankings, the content you share online increases brand awareness. It adds up and impacts SEO.

Now that we have seen the impact of social media on SEO let me provide straightforward answers to questions I’m often asked on this topic.

Does Social Media Improve SEO?

The brief answer to whether social media helps SEO is yes! But not exactly in the ways you may imagine. Brand exposure is increased through social media, but social media has no direct impact on SEO. Social media indirectly influences SEO rankings, although not directly affecting them. There may not be a direct correlation between social signals and SEO, but there are ways in which social signals influence your SEO. Your social media effort indirectly affects SEO rankings. Social media can provide a healthy boost to your SEO efforts.

What Is SEO in Social Media?

It’s a topic that never gets old. Social media SEO boosts your website’s organic traffic by using social media activities. The explanation is straightforward: social media is crucial for SEO in numerous ways. We use it as a complementary strategy for social media marketing and advertising. When using SEO for social media, businesses can direct users to their websites to build awareness, drive sales, and more.

What Are the Social Media Platforms Used for SEO?

You can use the following wide range of social channels to assist your search engine optimisation efforts.

YouTube.
X (Twitter).
Facebook.
Instagram.
LinkedIn.
Pinterest.

Although Quora is not strictly a social media platform, it is another site you can use to improve your SEO.

The rank building shows that if you have a substantial social media presence on these social platforms, it will be of help to your SEO efforts. Click To Tweet

Does Instagram Affect SEO?

According to this article, Instagram is perfect for SEO because it works like a small search engine, so SEO is valid. Instagram ranks well-optimised pages higher, attracting more active followers, driving engagement and improving page trust scores. In turn, all this leads to an even higher ranking.

Conclusion

Social media signals and search engine ranking are currently topics of debate. Regardless of the effects of social media on SEO today, it will soon be an essential ranking factor.

Whether your target audiences are consumers or other businesses, people do business with people, not companies. So, if you adopt a social media marketing strategy to make your brand more social, people will recognise and trust your brand.

You can use these social media SEO strategies to improve your Google search rankings today. Click To Tweet

This trust will positively impact your search engine optimisation, give you more prominence on the search engines, and bring more people to do business with you.

Schedule a free call if you need digital marketing or social strategy assistance to improve your online visibility and social media presence.

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