First, let’s get it out in the open that Google has made it crystal clear that a brand’s social media presence doesn’t have a direct impact on its search engine rankings. But, that’s just one piece of the SEO puzzle. The reality is that while social media might not help you directly rank a specific page for a specific keyword, it can have a massive boost to your overall SEO strategy. Below, we’ve laid out four ways that social SEO can indirectly increase your search visibility and organic search ranking.
4 Ways Social can Improve Your SEO
- Increase Traffic To Website
- Build Quality Links Back to Your Site
- Increase Brand Awareness
- Improve Your Site’s Reputation
Increase Website Traffic
While the total volume of traffic doesn’t influence site rankings, traffic quality and consistency have been known to impact SEO performance directly. Social media platforms are a powerful tool for driving more visitors to your site. In fact, 87% of marketers say that they saw an increase in web traffic from their social media presence.
Not only can social media help you attract more visitors to your website, it can also help keep them there. The longer a user stays on your site, the more they engage with your content, the stronger their experience, the better your site will rank in organic search results.
Build Quality Links to Your Site
Another way that social media can improve your SEO performance is by helping you build quality links back to your site. Quality links are essential for any website looking to rank high in search engine results pages as Google uses your website’s backlinks to determine the authority and relevancy of your site as it relates to specific keywords.
Increase Brand Awareness
Your website isn’t the only branded platform that can rank in Google. Each of your social media platforms also has the opportunity to rank in the coveted top ten. The stronger your presence on your social media accounts, the more likely these platforms will rank.
To give your social media platforms the best shot of ranking, be sure to:
- Consistently publish engaging content. (The more often people visit your social profiles, the more likely Google will rank them.)
- Link to your social profiles on your website.
- Have a 100% complete and optimized social profile (website links, properly sized photos, optimized About Us section, etc.).
Improve Your Site’s Reputation
Likes, comments, and shares have become fundamental engagement methods across all social media platforms. They are also critical indicators of the quality of the content being shared and the reputation of the account sharing that content.
In other words, the more engagement your social posts earn, the more they are likely to trust your content AND, by extension, your brand. And when audiences trust you, they are more likely to do business with you.
Maximize Your SEO With Advocacy Marketing
You’ve probably already seen companies in your industry leverage advocacy marketing on social media. It could be as simple as a company’s employees and fans sharing content regularly to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.
The goal of an advocacy marketing program (like SocialToaster) is to empower your key audiences with the tools they need to easily share your best content onto their personal social media platforms.
The result?
Instead of your blog post or video living only on your corporate platforms, your audience shares it to their news feeds of your advocacy program members. Each time it’s shared, it represents another opportunity to drive traffic, engage your audience, and build a more comprehensive network of links. All of which can help to improve your site’s search optimization efforts.
Improve Your Social Sharing to Improve Your Overall SEO
As you can see, social media plays a noteworthy role in overall SEO performance. And if you want to improve your website’s ranking, you need to make sure that you are using social media to its full potential. That’s where we can help. Contact us today to learn more about how SocialToaster can help you improve your organic search rankings.
