For many entrepreneurs new to the world of digital marketing, there is often a misconception that SEO and social media are separate entities, each operating in its own world with distinct goals. SEO and organic social media marketing work together to create value and bring relevance to your audience.
Any good digital marketing strategy should do everything possible to make SEO and social work together, in tandem. In this article, we’ll take a look at five ways SEO works in conjunction with social media to drive more visitors to your site.
Social Media Allows for Content Promotion
The first way that social media can (indirectly) help you rank in search engines is through content promotion. We can write, film, or record tons of high-quality, keyword-optimized content, but we still don’t have many eyes and ears to consume it. Social media allows you to take the quality content you’ve worked hard to produce and promote it across multiple channels.
Social media is the easiest and most effective way to spread your SEO-based content. While inbound links from your social media shares may not have the same impact as authentic links from high-quality websites, they can influence your bounce rate and website engagement.
If your content is good and people stick around to read it, these engagement metrics communicate value to search engines. Your goal should be to convert your best organic content into social media content so you can drive engagement and drive traffic to your site.
Social Media Encourages More Engagement
The second way social media can improve your website’s SEO is through increased engagement. If someone finds our content useful and shares it on a social media platform, that’s not a ranking signal for Google or Bing. However, the good news is that commitment is.
If you’re making the most of social media to promote your high-quality content, remember that engagement is important for SEO. Engagement helps not only improve your online reputation but also build connections and generate leads for your business.
Content that receives a lot of engagement on social media platforms will be categorized according to the topics they cover. According to Moz, “To determine success, an algorithm looks at whether users have engaged.
If more people engage, it’s a clear sign that your algorithm is displaying the right content; otherwise, their systems will listen to other content to find something that sparks that interest.”
Social Sharing Can Lead to Link Building
Building Links Through Social Media Social media can also lead to authentic, high-quality links from influential sites. Influencers use social media as much (or even more) than anyone else. With your content available on the same channels they’re on, they’re more likely to see it and link to it on their own websites or blogs. This type of high-value link-building influencer marketing may be impossible to achieve at a high rate without social media.
Social media is also helpful for SEO because it encourages more external sites to link to your content, and the more diverse external links you have, the more authority you gain in the eyes of Google. The problem is that you have to have high-quality, authoritative content or you won’t have anything of real value to attract links.
Increased Brand Awareness Improves Your SEO Rankings
The fourth way social media contributes to SEO is by increasing brand awareness. This may seem like more of a brand advantage than a specific SEO advantage, but the SEO benefit is huge! Increasing your reputation on social media, through increased engagement and consistent, high-quality content posting, will lead to a greater brand presence online.
A growing brand presence will lead to more brand searches on Google over time. The more brand searches your brand receives, the more likely it is to rank for non-brand keywords.
Google’s Partnership with Twitter
Twitter Bird Finally, it’s important to recognize that Google has a partnership with Twitter. We don’t know exactly what this means for the future of search and social marketing. However, we know that it’s common to see relevant tweets in Google search results for branded searches.
The fact that your Twitter posts appear in search results does not affect the SEO of your site, but it can improve your brand recognition, and your authority and increase the creation of links with other sites.
According to renowned marketer Neil Patel, there are several ways to take advantage of the Twitter/Google partnership, the most obvious being to remember to tweet and tweet often. As long as this association exists, user search will lead to tweets (and Twitter hashtags) with similar keywords.
Wrapping Up…
While social media often works to improve your website’s organic ranking on Google, it has the ability to serve as an invaluable tool over time! Whether it’s through content promotions, increased engagement, more link building, increased brand awareness or leveraging Google’s relationship with Twitter, you’ll leverage social media to increase your organic traffic and conversions through search.