Does Social Media Have Any Impact on SEO?

social media seo

The world of marketing is fast and complicated. So many times, new clients come to us confused. They aren’t sure how everything in their marketing efforts fits together or affects the other aspects of their marketing strategy.

If this is where you find yourself, you are not alone. As a small business owner, your first and main priority is understanding your own business. Of course, you aren’t expected to be a marketing expert, but you should be using every tool available to you to create an effective strategy. That’s why we’re here as marketing professionals to help you understand and create a cohesive marketing strategy for your business.

One of the biggest questions that clients will then come to us with is how does social media impact my SEO? We’ll get straight to the point and say that it does not directly impact your SEO in any way. Instead, social media can be used as a tool to increase your influence, brand recognition and to direct people to your website.

Content Creation & Social Media Shares

As a business owner, you should have several goals for your social media. Building brand recognition, increasing customer trust, and directing users back to your website are all great goals. So today we’re going to focus on boosting your site traffic for SEO purposes.

Creating high-quality content that helps your customers should always be a top priority. Everything starts with creating relevant content that they will want to read. In turn, you can take these blogs and content that you write and share them with social media posts. Helpful content links will help engage your customers, build trust, and give them a reason to click back on your website.

Quality content and higher social media shares can also lead to more quality backlinks. For example, if people continue to share a specific article you wrote, then other people are more likely to want to link to it and continue sharing that content.

Is Social Media a Google Ranking Factor?

No. It is not. However, it indirectly influences some ranking factors and shows Google that users trust your content.

An example is sharing a blog post you wrote on your website to Facebook. When you share it, the goal is to drive quality traffic back to your website. If people like the content, they may click over to it and share it. This increases your chances of having even more people head to your website so, while Google doesn’t view the post itself, all of those people landing on your website count as views for your SEO stats.

Increasing Brand Awareness

Social media is a great way to increase brand awareness and introduce new customers to your product. While this is more of a slow game and a way to build trust, it does have a long-term impact on your SEO. Because social media is so personal, users often trust brands more that they have interacted with online.

Later on down the road, when they’re in the market to purchase your product or service, they will be more likely to head to your website and become paying customers because they interacted with you on social media.

What to Do Next

So, now that you know how social media can impact your SEO, you may be wondering what you can do to improve your social media strategies.

Here are 7 quick tips to help you be successful in using social media to boost your SEO rankings:

  1. Publish high-quality content
  2. Make sharing your content easy for users
  3. Optimize your social media profiles
  4. Optimize your images for SCO and social media
  5. Actively communicate with your clients and build relationships
  6. Regularly evaluate your social media strategy and analytics
  7. Create compelling captions for your posts

Next week we’ll dig into each of these 7 tips in-depth to help you dig into your social media strategy with SEO in mind. So make sure to be on the lookout for the next post!