A Marriage Of Epic Importance SEO And Social Media

Since 2010, both Google and Bing have officially confirmed that social media is a determining factor in SEO ranking. You may be tempted to think that simply having a social media channel is enough to swing the decision in your favour – it’s not.

Search engines also look at which social media channels you are on and the type of engagement you receive. Research conflicts as to whether links from social media channels are counted as backlinks and there are reasons to assume that this is changing as we speak. However, there are certain indirect social media results towards to your SEO efforts.

• Google+ posts are automatically indexed and ranked by Google based on your post’s content
• Links shared in posts that are ‘+1’ posts, rank higher on results pages for users signed into Google+

Having your social media posts appear in search results provides you with another opportunity to engage with a new audience. In Google+’s case, it also means you rank higher for signed in users.

There Is A Lot Of Noise On Twitter…

Many business owners avoid Twitter as they find their message is lost within the sea of hundreds of thousands of posts. Just like Google+, don’t rule it out of your social media selection.

In 2015, Twitter announced they would be providing Google with API access to index tweets. Hoorah! But Google cannot possibly index every single tweet, so there are a few rules that apply:

• Tweet regularly
• Have more followers than you follow
• Ensure you get plenty of likes, retweets and replies
• Add links, images and relevant hashtags to your posts
• Try to avoid mentions (@twittername for example) in your posts
• Consider using Twitter Ads to jump start your visibility

Having your social media posts appear in search results provides you with another opportunity to engage with a new audience and display authority in your sector.

Sharing Can Lead To Links And Higher Rankings!

Whenever you share content with a link to your site, you are exposing it to a wider audience – potentially a very influential audience. Whenever a peer or bigger brand share a link to your website on social media, this helps you reach a wider audience, and also increases the likelihood you may appear within their website content.

This is your ideal situation – increased social media reach and increased backlinks from influential websites to yours, both having the potential to increase your search engine rankings! You’ve heard the term ‘going viral’, right? This is where you strike gold!

So bearing this in mind, you want to ensure your links are looking at their best. You can do this using ‘rich snippets’. These are automatically generated by several social media channels whenever a link is shared.

Rich snippets automatically pick up your meta title, description and an image on the page. This could be any image – and you may not want to use your default meta title and description. You may choose to be marketing savvy and write different engaging text for your social media audience.

Both Schema and Open Graph Protocol Tags will allow you to use a custom title, description and image for your social media that differs from your meta title and description. To double check how your rich snippet will appear on Facebook, you can use their free Sharing Debugger.

What Are The Best Social Media Websites For SEO?

There are many social media sites for SEO, these websites are perfect for SEO and social media marketing because they appear in searches and rank high on SERP’s. for most consumers, if they want to connect or buy from a brand, they will visit the company’s social media profiles and not their websites.

This is because social media provides a more personal experience, and the response time is often quicker. Social media is more effective when connecting with your buyer persona.

Social media isn’t a ranking factor, so it won’t help your ranking, while there is no direct ranking correlation between the two, the benefits of social media do feed into SEO, so if you’re trying to improve your SEO, it is especially important for you to invest in social.

Here Is Why…

1. You can boost your content performance
2. There are more opportunities to gain backlines
3. Social profiles can rank for search terms
4. You’ll bring more traffic to your website
5. Good social profiles build trust

Everything you do to build your business online should work together. SEO and social media both have their own benefits for businesses, but they’re even more effective when they support one another.

Having social media profiles for your business might not automatically do anything for your SEO, but you should keep at it, and you’ll see how they work better together.

Social media profiles consistently rank among top search results, particularly for branded keywords, social media profiles are often front and centre and immediately following any given brands’ website result. Now lets go over why social media is important in SEO.

10 Reasons Why Social Media Is Important In SEO

Social media provides opportunities in content marketing and link building efforts that will help boost your organic rankings.

1. Social media = increased visibility = more links
2. Social can help you improve SEO ranking signals
3. Posting on social gets content indexed quicker
4. Social interaction data can help you improve your SEO content
5. Social media helps build search demand
6. Social media helps you identify the audience for your SEO content
7. Social media is great place to conduct keyword research
8. Social media can help you generate new content ideas
9. Social helps you claim owned SEFP real estate for branded queries
10. Social drives traffic while you wait for SEO

On search engines, people only discover your content when they’re searching for a relevant keyword, when your using social media you’ll get your content in front of people who didn’t even realise that they needed your content!

Better content reach translates into high quality traffic which will again affects your rankings.

When dealing with social media, you have to remember SEO, social media does not directly contribute to SEO ranking, but what it does is the links you share across social platforms increase brand exposure.

How Does Social Media Impact SEO?

1. Extensive content distribution
2. Longer lifespan of your posts
3. Improve online visibility & organic traffic
4. Increase brand recognition
5. Enhance brand reputation
6. Boosts local search engine optimisation

Your shares across social media sites have no place in SEO ranking but yet when more people share your content throughout social signals that indicate your posts are useful to your target market.

So why is social media important for SEO? Since social media indirectly influences the factors that impact search rankings, this is important because it has the potential to drive quality web traffic to your blog.

When you are creating and publishing quality materials that connects with your target readers, they become advocates. Why? Because you offer them something of value to them and it means that your audience will read and share the articles with their friends and followers.

This will then do the same and the circle will continue, keep that in mind. Some types of content that drive traffic and social shares are

• Blog posts
• Videos
• Infographics
• Podcasts

How Does Social Media Connect With SEO?

Social media is not a ranking factor but it has a link search engine optimisation. Those signals in the mass sharing useful content across social media sites, the more your audience will likely share the posts with their follower base.

Content amplification to facilitate indexing and ranking

It would be great if every time you published a new piece of content it would land right on page one of good search results, imagine…

• Over 25% of people click the first search results
• 75% of people only click results from page one

You need other ways to get discovered, that’s where social media comes in.

• Sharing pages and posts on social media
• More traffic from other sources mean more chances to get noticed by google
• Faster indexing
• Social post reach a targeted audience already interested in your business
• Regularly sharing relevant, helpful content builds your audience
• Drive traffic to older content

Brand awareness, SEO loves:

• To be able to grow your business, people need to know what your about
• Hashtags and keyword
• Commenting
• Share their experience
• Leads to thousands of follows
• Amplifies your business to their larger following

Build trust in your business

Trust in your business is essential to growth, social proof is important, people want to see reviews, testimonials and more before they give you their money

Social media for bigger, better link-building

Backlinks play a HUGE role in your ranking, backlinks aka inbound links,

Social media support local SEO, Local SEO is essential in some industries — like hospitality, dining, and entertainment

Google Isn’t The Be All And End All

Social media channels have their own search engines too, such as Facebook’s local search. Optimise your posts within your chosen social media channel using relevant keywords in the posts as well as hashtags.