There is always a great amount of BUZZ around how SEO can influence social media.
Social media SEO refers to how social media activities can boost your website’s organic traffic through search engines. It’s a topic that never gets old. The reason being simple: social media is important for SEO in more than one way. It not only makes your SEO activities effective but also lucrative. Yes, social media and SEO might look different, but there’s no doubt that they help each other.
However, contrary to popular belief, social media doesn’t directly contribute to SEO. In other words, social signals don’t directly help rank better. The links that you share on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest may help your brand get more exposure, but they aren’t seen by Google as a ranking signal.
Now, here’s the thing: even though social media is not a ranking factor on a superficial level, it has significance if you look deeper. Indirectly, it does have a positive effect on a page’s ranking. So yes, there is a definite correlation between a site’s position in the SERPs and the number of social signals it has.
Traffic has always been considered as one of the major ranking factors. Social media affects your site traffic by providing more visibility to your content.
When lots of people share your content within their networks, they’re going to send more traffic to your website and therefore, boost your rankings.
Social media is an excellent channel to ensure that your content reaches as many people as possible. On search engines, people only discover your content when they’re searching for a relevant keyword. But on social media, you’ll be getting your content in front of people who didn’t even realize that they needed your content.
Better content reach translates into high-quality traffic which, again, affects your rankings. Matthew Woodward conducted an experiment to try to rank for the keyword “unhealthiest foods.” While he did have a backlink strategy in place, what really made the difference for him were social media shares.
Once someone shared it on social media, it was shared over and over again until George Takei himself shared the post. His share garnered 16,000+ likes and 8,800+ shares. Soon after, the post got a featured snippet for the target search term. This shows how impactful social shares can be, especially when an influential social media personality is involved.
People don’t just use search engines to look stuff up. With robust search functionalities, social media platforms also serve as valuable search engines themselves. There may be people who discover your profile, page, or content through social media search.
That’s why it’s crucial to optimise your social media pages and content with relevant keywords to boost your visibility. You can use tools like SpyFu to look up the keywords for which your competitors are ranking and which keywords are getting them clicks.
Social media also affects your local SEO efforts in a few ways.
As you already know, your NAP (the name, address, and phone number of your business) plays an important role in local search rankings.
If you maintain consistent NAP information across all of your listings and website, Google will consider your business as more credible. And that can boost your rankings in local search results. Which makes it crucial to use the same NAP information across your social media profiles, local listings, and website.
Additionally, some social media platforms let you geo-tag your Stories and posts. This is a great way to gain more visibility among a local audience, helping you expand your reach.
On Instagram, for instance, users can conduct a search for content that’s geotagged to a specific location. You should be able to attract more local visitors this way.
YouTube videos get prominent rankings in search engine results. In fact, popular and relevant YouTube videos will be the first to show up for certain searches.This makes it crucial to optimise your YouTube channel and videos for SEO. All you need to do is optimise the video descriptions and titles with relevant keywords. This will help you gain more visibility not just within the platform but also in regular search results.
As you can see from these points, social media plays a crucial role in your overall SEO strategy even though it may not directly affect your rankings. It mainly works by bringing your brand and content more visibility, which in turn drives more traffic.
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