When’s the last time you heard an SEO say that social media is something you should implement into your SEO strategy? I’d place my bet on never. There’s good reason for that, social media is a completely separate marketing sphere, something that we in ‘SEO land’ don’t really care too much about. Sure, we know that it can deliver good results but it doesn’t impact our job so why should we care, right?
Well, you really should care because social media can have a tremendous affect on your SEO efforts. Whilst it doesn’t affect them directly, it definitely does help indirectly and at the end of the day, all we care about is getting your site higher up those SERPs (search engine result pages), we shouldn’t care all too much about whether it’s done directly or indirectly.
So how exactly does social media impact SEO?
How social media impacts SEO?
As I’ve already mentioned, social media can have a very positive impact on SEO. Now let’s dive a bit deeper into what the actual impacts are and how social media achieves these:
Social Profiles are pages that can rank for search terms
When people search for your business, there’s a good chance that your social media pages will show up high up, along with your actual website. This increases the amount of SERP real estate that your business can take up and pushes any sneaky competitors further down. For example, if you were to search for ‘Shane Parkins’, the entire page is taken up by this website and all related social media pages. No sneaky competitors taking clicks away from our brand term.
Another benefit is that it offers people multiple avenues to explore when interacting with your business. Some people may not want to sit there and read long articles about your services, they may instead be more interested in jumping on your social media pages for shorter format content. Giving people options is always recommended.
More visitors = More engagement = positive user signals
If you’re starting a brand new site, it’s unlikely that any users are going to come across your content anytime soon since nobody really goes past page one too often. So any content that you produce will remain unseen for months (this is especially bad if the content is related to current events).
Posting your content on social media is far more likely to result in views and user interaction, some of which may end up spilling over to your website. The more engagement your site receives, the better it looks to Google. If user’s are going onto your site and engaging with your content, it’s a clear sign that your content is high quality. Wouldn’t you know it but Google likes high quality content.
On the other hand, if users are going onto your site and not engaging with your content too well, it’s a clear signal that the content you have produced is not meeting their requirements. Tweaking it or possibly rewriting it should improve your user signals, and with improved user experience often comes higher SERP rankings (this isn’t a direct correlation but Google does priortise sites which offer a good user experience).
You increase your chances of getting a backlink
As we all know, backlinks are incredibly powerful when it comes to SEO – they are signals to Google that your site is trustworthy and valuable enough for other people to want to share it. The trouble is, as with most good things in life, getting backlinks is no walk in the park.
The most effective way to get backlinks to your site is just by producing high quality content that people want to share. Done that? Great, but how are you going to get backlinks if no one is seeing it?
This links back to the previous point so I won’t bang on too much about it. Put simply, sharing your content on social media will also increase your chances of people sharing your website. All it takes is a single person to mention you in an article and your content has just been opened to a whole new audience.
You’re exposed to new audiences
Whilst Google is great and will always remain the top search engine, there are people, especially in younger age groups, that choose to use social media platforms as their search engines of choice – these are audiences which won’t come across your business if you don’t have a social media presence.
So how does this benefit SEO? Well, you’re ultimately driving your social media audience to your website which, as mentioned before, can lead to additional engagement and extra backlinks – both of these benefit SEO.
Tips for maximising social media impact on SEO
All of the above sounds great but it’s not a given that you’ll reap all of these benefits just by starting social media pages. Follow the below tips to give yourself a better chance of success:
- Post regularly – This really depends on which social media page you’re posting on. For the most part, i’d recommend 2 or 3 times a week. However, platforms such as Youtube or Tiktok prefer higher volume accounts so once a day is a good target to aim for if you want to grow quickly.
- Post high quality valuable content – Posting every day is pointless if you’re posting utter rubbish. Make sure your content provides some value – this can be anything which helps your target audience out. For example, our Youtube channel has a bunch of videos which explain common SEO issues and how to fix them.
- Apply SEO to social media – Remember that social media is just like any other search engine. Whereas Google looks for keywords, social media platforms look for hashtags. Target relevant hashtags which you wish to show up for. Don’t forget to mention these keywords across your profiles too.
- Create synergy across all platforms – If you write a blog post for your website, be sure to post a corresponding youtube video, social media clips and articles. Then try to include some of these in your article. For example, if you post a blog on ‘the best supplements for the winter’, you should make a youtube video breakdown and include that in the article. This creates synergy between your site and youtube account. What’s better is that Google likes it when you do this and may boost you up a tad for doing so.
Summary
Neglecting social media is a mistake too many businesses make and definitely something that SEOs don’t really think about. Whilst it’s not exactly a necessity, it can definitely provide your SEO efforts with a much needed boost. The opportunity of additional backlinks alone should be enough for you to take social media seriously (believe me, getting backlinks to your site can be a pain).
If you’ve read this far down, I applaud you for taking SEO seriously. Why not consider reading more of our blog posts to supercharge your SEO knowledge, or go one step further and take on an experienced SEO freelancer, one who has been delivering impressive growth for some of the UK’s largest brands for over 14 years. If you’d like to chat about how we could work together to fire you up those SERPs, don’t hesitate to drop me a line.
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