5 Ways Social Media Impacts Your SEO

In the business of internet marketing, we often emphasize how important social media is for your SEO rankings, and how well it serves to spread information in the modern age. However, today, we'll look more deeply into the connection between social media and social media marketing and SEO. Namely, we'll explore how social media improves your rankings while not being a de facto ranking factor.

As Google puts it, the likes and shares you get on your social platforms do not directly influence your site's authority. Still, we'll show you how can they indirectly improve your site's exposure and improve their position in Google's search engine.

1. Why doesn't Google use social media shares and likes to boost your rankings?

The answer to this question is simple: if Google were to use your shares and likes as a legitimate factor for website rankings, the system would be very easy to abuse. You already know about businesses creating fake profiles to leave comments on their products saying how awesome they are, or people comment bombing people on Reddit and similar websites. This is why Google doesn't choose to factor the popularity of your posts on your social media platforms.

However, all posts are indexed, and, thus, they become assets that can be used actually to boost your brand's visibility and exposure, and, ultimately, create a high-authority website later down the line.

2. Social media builds up authority

When it comes to the best SEO practices in 2020, link building is one of the most common and successful strategies for improving one's rankings. But, what is link building? Link building is the practice of embedding quality links into one's content that points to other high-authority websites, and, conversely, having them imbed links into their content pointing toward you. This, in turn, makes the content in those websites more relevant for their specific search queries, and, thus, they get ranked higher in Google's engine.

Now, the way social media can help you with this is that your website's content is getting shared on social media, and the more it gets shared, the more people will see it. With that being said, all that exposure will lead people to recognize your content as relevant, high-quality and as having authority on specific topics.

This leads to people linking to your content in their blogs and posts, which, in turn, boosts your SEO rankings.

3. Social media builds up brands

Social media platforms build brand awareness, and that's a fact. No business, however large, will ever neglect the power their followers have in keeping their brand top of the line. That is why businesses across the world are always striving to build a following on social media first. Having a community emerge around your product/service, means you've now got a dedicated audience you can use to boost your SEO rankings.

Your followers will share your content, which will create more exposure, which, in turn, leads to your content being cited more often on other websites. It also means that you'll have more people streaming toward your site, and all those clicks and time spent by your followers/visitors/customers on your website will ensure Google that your content is high-quality and highly relevant, and, thus, deserving of prime SERP real estate.

4. Social media improves local SEO

For smaller businesses, earning the notice of the local community is paramount. If you've got a small store and you're just starting, you'll very likely try to engage as many locals as you can as means of generating income and growth for your business. And with the power, social media has when it comes to marketing, you'll undoubtedly use it for advertising your products and services.

The key to ranking high in local SEO is your NAP (name, address, and phone number).

If you display your NAP consistently on social media platforms, Google will deem your business as more relevant for your area and will list it higher for related search queries. Professionals, like the ones at GWM Melbourne, will most certainly tell you to use social media to display your NAP, as well as geotag your stories where possible (Instagram, for example, has this feature) as means of getting the notice of both Google and locals looking for a product/service you may be able to provide.

5. Use social media to do market research

One of the best ways to use social media is to facilitate market research. We already said that brands use social media platforms to form communities around their products/services, but, before they got to that step, they first used it to research their specific market niche. This ties into both the concept of PMF (Product/market fit) and the concept of SEO.

By engaging the public, you can create a product or service that will fit your market niche as perfectly as possible, while also finding out the best ways of reaching your target audience.

Through using social media, you'll be able to find out what your audience searches for and how they do it, which will allow you to create the keywords that match your audience's search queries well. It also allows you to see what devices they use most often (mobile, tablets, PC), and optimize your posts and content for those devices, as most people get easily frustrated if the content they're trying to consume does not work well on their device of choice.

Conclusion

All in all, social media might not directly influence your SEO rankings, but it is a potent ally that will most certainly help you get the prime SERP real estate you're looking to get better click-through rates. The way social media does this is that it facilitates exposure, helps create strong brand sense and following, helps indirectly improve your local SEO ranking, and helps significantly with market research.

All this proves that social media and SEO have a powerful bond and that businesses that choose to ignore one of these tools won't get the results they need to ensure their success.

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Recommended reading

If you enjoyed this post and have a little extra time to dive deeper down the rabbit hole, why not check out the following posts on social media and SEO.

• How Community Outreach Marketing Can Boost Your SEO
• 6 Reasons You Should Follow Your Competitors On Social Media
• How To Write Social Media Captions that Spark Engagement
• How Is Social Media Good For My Business

Tags: SEO, Social Media, Guest Post