Social Media and SEO: 7 Brilliant Ways Social Media Can Boost Your SEO

social media and seo

Google gets almost 80,000 searches per second on a typical day. Even companies with the biggest social media following will have a hard time competing with that kind of volume.

The sheer number of people looking for answers on Google makes search engine optimization (SEO) a valuable marketing strategy. That doesn’t mean you should ignore social media though. When used effectively, social media can boost your SEO results so you get the best of both worlds.

Let’s look at seven ways social media and SEO can work together.

Content Promotion & Reach

One of the most important factors in ranking well in search engines is having other websites talking about your content. This includes mentioning your website or business name, quoting your content, and especially linking to your content.

One of the fundamental uses of social media is sharing useful information. If your audience is sharing your content, it’s more likely to reach people who might never have seen it otherwise. Those people may share it with their followers, and so on.

Backlinks

Backlinks, which are links to content on your website from other sites, are a critical part of SEO. Google’s original design determined how to rank sites almost entirely through these links.

While it has added various other factors to its algorithm over the years, and some SEO tactics have become obsolete, links are still important (and effective). When someone shares your content on social media, that creates a new backlink from Facebook, Twitter, or whatever social network it’s on that points back to your website.

Combine that with the extra links you’ll build through the previous point, content promotion and reach, and it can multiply your SEO success pretty quickly.

Building Partnerships

Social media makes it easy to find complementary businesses and websites to your own. You can connect with them through social networks and develop partnerships that’ll let you leverage each other’s audiences, websites, and other resources.

This can include linking to one another’s work, creating more backlinks, and extending your reach even further. Or you could promote one another on pages that are already ranking well, letting you piggyback on each other’s successes. This can save you a lot of time, effort, and money to get your own content ranked.

Brand Awareness

Social media is a great way to build brand awareness. The more people see your name, the more recognizable it becomes and the more likely they’ll be to click on your page in search results.

This won’t directly help your content rank higher in search results, but it’ll help you get higher click-through rates on content that’s ranked. And one of Google’s ranking factors is the click-through rate on the pages that are listed in its results.

If one of the pages on your website is getting more clicks in the results than another, Google sees your page as being more valuable to searchers. This can help your page rank even higher, especially if it’s getting more clicks than pages that are listed above it in the results.

Engagement

Another factor Google considers when ranking sites is how much engagement your website is getting. If a searcher clicks on your page in the results and clicks back to choose another one right away, it’s a signal your page isn’t meeting their needs.

On the other hand, if they click through and don’t come back to look for another result, Google gives your page an extra SEO boost.

Most social networks have features you can embed on your website to keep people engaged. Adding features like Facebook comments or embedded Twitter posts to your page can help keep people on your site longer.

Creating “Buzz”

Google’s index contains over 130 trillion pages. It constantly crawls the web, including all the major social networks, looking for new pages to add to its index.

If your company or website is getting a lot of mentions on one or more social media sites, Google’s crawler will recognize that “buzz” and it can help your ranking in search results. In some cases, your search rankings can improve even if there aren’t a lot of links pointing to your site. All the activity around it can be enough to help.

Testing & Optimizing

One of the best ways to use social media to help with your SEO is to use it for testing and optimizing your pages. Because social media can generate traffic to your website so quickly, you can optimize your pages for better engagement, more shares, and better conversion rates.

If you have a decent-sized following, you can do a lot of this testing for no cost. Share the page you want to optimize with your audience, tweak a few things, then share it again.

Alternatively, you can run some social media ads on sites like Facebook and Twitter for a surprisingly low cost if you target your ads well. By spending a bit of money upfront, you can start with a well-optimized page so you get the highest possible ROI once your SEO efforts start showing results.

Social Media and SEO Work Hand-in-Hand

A lot of people treat social media and SEO as completely independent marketing channels. That approach will work up to a point, but they’re missing out on the multiplier effect of combining the two into an integrated campaign.

Using SEO and social media marketing together will help you get immediate results as well as build a stronger foundation that can generate traffic to your website for little or no cost, for years to come.

Would you like to get a detailed report of what you can do to help improve your website’s ranking in the search engines? Use Site Report Card’s free SEO audit tool to perform a thorough SEO audit of your site and to give you a list of actionable ideas to help your site rank higher.