Having a strong presence on social media improves SEO efforts for any site. This blog post explores the interaction between social media marketing and SEO, and how the two complement each other. The post explores some of the same themes as Use Social Media To Generate Traffic and goes into a bit more depth Please note that we purchased this article on the INA Marketplace, where you can get great content written by our top writers on a variety of topics, and on top of all that, they’re all available for download immediately! Please check out all of our social media marketing posts here.
How Social Media Improves SEO Results
A lot has been said about how social media improves SEO results. For the vast majority of marketers, the high concentration of users on the various social media platforms provides a great avenue to spread the word about their companies’ products or services.
Facebook, one of the dominating social media companies has accrued an enormous user base around the globe through Facebook (with over 1.86 billion active users), Instagram (with over 600 million active users), and Whatsapp (with over 1.2 billion active users) – based on statistics released early in 2017. When you take into consideration the number of active users other social media platforms have such as Pinterest (150 million users), Twitter (317 million users), Tumblr (550 million users), LinkedIn (106 million), Snapchat (300 million users), and Google + have, you can begin to appreciate the marketing opportunities that social media as an industry wields.
But it is not just a matter of how big these social media platforms are but also the level of penetration that social media as an industry has attained. For instance, Facebook has attained a penetration rate of about 89% among internet user in the US. This shows just how popular these sites are. Additionally, when it comes to user engagement Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat are well known for their stellar engagement. With this in mind, it makes sense to use social media marketing as well as SEO to reap the benefits of both worlds.
Below we are going to explore how social media can (positively) influence the results of SEO. By doing this, we hope to help you understand how social media platforms can bolster your SEO efforts and improve the return on investment from marketing.
#1. Social Media Improves SEO Rankings For Your Website – Prior to Google’s Matt Cutts coming out in a video back in 2013 to clarify that Google’s search algorithm does not use social signals to determine rank, the vast majority of SEOs believed that Google used social signals to as a ranking factor. And even after this clarification, many marketers still believe that links to your website from social media platforms may be considered as genuine links, and thus used in the ranking of your websites. After all, these are too significant links for Google to ignore (especially during instances of viral content).
Away from Google, other search engines have openly admitted to using social signals to determine to rank websites. Bing came out as far back as 2010 to say that it incorporates social signals in the determination of ranking, stating “We take into consideration how often a link has been tweeted or retweeted, as well as the authority of the Twitter users that shared the link.” Therefore, if only for purposes of improving your ranking on Bing, you should maintain a presence on social media platforms.
#2. Social Media Pages Are Ranked Too – Beyond actively contributing to improving your website’s ranking, your social media profile pages are also ranked on their own. In the same video from Matt Cutts in 2013 when he clarified that Google does not use social signals to determine a website’s rank, he also said that the search giant actively crawls social media sites just as it does regular web pages.
Consequently, it’s important for businesses to optimize their social media profile pages as well. By optimizing social media profile pages, businesses can increase the the number of properties at the top of the search engine results page. Moreover, ranking social profile pages is a tad easier due to the pre-existing high domain author of websites such as Facebook and Twitter.
Optimizing your social profile for search engine ranking also makes it easier for traffic in your niche to understand who you are as a business, your product and services and most importantly, your values. This improves user engagement and portrays your business profile in a more personal manner.
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#3. Social Media Platforms Are Now Search Engines – In many regards, social media platforms have morphed to search engines in their own right. People are using social media platforms (and Amazon) more frequently to conduct internet searches instead of using the traditional search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Consider this; in 2010, Twitter handled more than 19 billion search queries every month. In the same year, YouTube received 3.7 billion search queries every single month. In 2012, Facebook handled more than 1 billion search queries every single day. You can expect the number of search queries to have exponentially increased over the past several years, increasing the credibility of social sites as search engines in their own right.
Therefore, it is of critical importance for businesses and marketers to broaden their understanding of search engines and search engine optimization to cover many of these mainstream social media sites. With the above considerations in mind, you can appreciate that engaging the social media community and being active in social media improves SEO results, and allows you to take advantage of the ever-increasing search queries carried out on social media platforms.
We think it’s clear that businesses ignore social media at their own peril. The growth in usage and influence of social media points towards a future dominated by social media experiences. Capitalize on these trends! Focus on your social media pages and engage with the social media community – these efforts are sure to be rewarded.