You’re probably already leveraging social media to promote your brand and connect with your audience, but have you considered using social media for SEO?
Social media platforms are ideal for exposing your products and services to a wide audience, interacting with influencers in your niche, and sharing content that builds your brand authority.
You can use quality graphics to increase brand recognition and build relationships with a highly-relevant audience who already love your brand and what you offer.
While these advantages are valuable by themselves, social media can be a powerful tool to improve your SEO positioning.
In the blog, we’ll walk you through five strategies for using social media for SEO. But first, let’s understand a bit about the relationship between Google and social media.
Is Social Media a Google Ranking Factor?
In today’s world, businesses need to be active on social media platforms. It has become a massive part of how brands interact with their customers.
Therefore, it’s no surprise that the line between social media and the traditional web has become blurred.
So, of course, Google considers social media as a huge ranking factor. Right?
Unfortunately not.
Google has repeatedly denied this stating that social media is not a ranking factor. However, the story doesn’t really end there.
Do we think social media activity have an impact on SERPs ranking? Yes, we do. But it’s probably not the way you imagine.
Here’s the thing.
Social media interactions have varied effects on search engine rankings.
It has both direct and indirect benefits, and we’ll discuss both of them in this blog.
The relationship between social media and Google SEO has always been more of a grey zone.
To understand this relationship, we need to dive into the history between them.
The story of Google+
Google’s entry into the social media world with Google+ was not just to capitalize on it financially; the information it would gain access to was also a huge factor.
When Google+ was established, Google didn’t have access to other social media platforms. However, with social media, they could gain an in-depth insight into trends and relationships.
So, it’s obvious that Google+ was meant to be a ranking factor for SEO. However, things didn’t go as intended for Google.
While Google+ does have over 200 million users, it’s more due to the fact that every time a user creates an account on Google, there’s a Google+ account created for them automatically.
It’s hard to say how many of them actually use Google+ regularly.
Therefore, Google+ didn’t turn out to be the resource Google wanted it to be.
But what about other social media platforms?
First, here’s a basic rundown of how Google’s search engine works.
It crawls every single page published online and stores the content on a page by page basis within its index.
Currently, there are 2.62 billion pages on the web that are indexable. Crawling and indexing all these pages keeps Google considerably busy.
Let’s take a look at Facebook now.
On average, around 4.75 billion posts are published on Facebook every single day. This means about 3.3 million new posts are shared on Facebook each minute.
It would take Facebook less than a day to match the volume of pages that Google crawls across the entire web.
According to Matt Cutts, the lack of capacity to crawl and index these pages is the major reason why Google doesn’t include social media activity as a ranking factor.
Embed video: https://youtu.be/udqtSM-6QbQ
According to Matt, social media profiles are their own organic search results.
However, we have all noticed a strong correlation between social media signals and search engine rankings.
To be honest, that isn’t very surprising.
If a web page is popular on social media, it more often than not ticks all the right SEO attributes, for example — backlinks or inbound links.
However, this doesn’t mean that social signals cause the page to rank or vice versa.
While Google may not be able to crawl and index anywhere near all the posts shared on social media, this doesn’t mean that social media content won’t be a Google ranking factor in the future.
On the other hand, Bing has been quite upfront about using social media as a ranking factor. So, if you’re looking to rank on search engines other than Google, you know what to do.
7 Simple Social Media Strategies You Can Use to Boost Your SEO
1.Using Social Media for SEO can help build Backlinks
Social Media is an excellent way of acquiring quality backlinks.
But wait. Do social media backlinks even count?
Here’s the thing. When one website includes a link to another, it can be called a backlink. However, only some types of backlinks count towards your Google SEO efforts.
Other than the fact that Google doesn’t consider social media activity as a ranking factor, there is another simple SEO explanation as to why social shares don’t contribute towards your SEO.
There are two types of backlinks — nofollow and dofollow.
When a website uses a nofollow tag when they link to your website, it signals Google that the link is not an endorsement. Therefore, it’s crucial to gain dofollow backlinks for it to count towards your SEO.
When something is shared on social media, these links tend to have nofollow tags. Therefore, they don’t have a direct impact on your SERPs rankings.
This doesn’t mean you can’t use social media platforms for link-building. It’s an excellent opportunity for businesses to build quality connections while promoting their content to a relevant and broader audience.
If you build the right strategy, you can organically gain dofollow links to your website.
When people engage with your content on social media, they’re bound to share it, boosting your brand’s visibility.
This increase in visibility increases the potential for your content to be showcased in front of people who are likely to link to your content from their site.
Social media for link building also holds the potential of acquiring backlinks from diverse sources, which is excellent from an SEO perspective.
2.User-Generated Content
What does user-generated content mean?
In simple terms, any content that is created by your users based on their ideas, opinions, experiences, or feedback can be categorized as user-generated content.
This includes reviews, testimonials, blogs, tweets or other social media posts. This type of content can add a lot of value to your brand.
User-generated content is honest and experience-driven; therefore, it’s priceless when it comes to associating your brand with values like reliability, trust, and authenticity.
From an SEO perspective, brands have a fresh flow of free and original content that highlights their products and gives them inside knowledge about their audience and their interests.
We’ve had companies come up to us and give us a list of keywords their customers associate them with. However, sometimes these keywords couldn’t be farther from reality.
Here’s the deal:
You may have preconceived notions about your business and how your audience perceives you, but that may not always be true.
User-generated content allows businesses to understand the language and phrases their customers use to describe their products or services. It helps them understand their brand’s strengths and weaknesses and build strategies to tackle them.
It’s no doubt that user-generated content is a goldmine for customer research and keyword generation.
User-generated content also serves as excellent social proof and boosts your brand awareness and reputation.
Content shared by real customers improves your credibility and puts your brand’s promises into perspective.
Let’s look at an example.
After going through a renovation, Sydney’s Ovolo Hotel showcased itself as the “World’s first Instagrammable hotel.” Following the statement, the hotel invited people to click and share pictures from the inside.
Brands worldwide make specific promises to their audience.
Ovolo’s promise was that their hotel would be the perfect place for Instagrammers.
When their customers shared Instagram shots from the hotel, their social proof from user-generated content undoubtedly raised their brand value and credibility.
Here are a few ideas you can implement to encourage your audience to create content that serves your brand:
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Encourage users to share their stories and opinions.
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Ask questions.
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Organize online events like webinars.
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Conduct quizzes and other contests.
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Host giveaways.
3. Using Social Media for SEO Gets Content Indexed Quicker
Organic traffic is crucial for the growth of your website and business.
According to research, nearly 53% of your website’s traffic is due to organic search.
However, these statistics don’t make much sense if your business doesn’t rank on search engines.
The first step to do so is to get your website indexed by Google (or Bing or any other search engines you’re targeting)
How do you do this?
There are two ways.
First, you can patiently wait for weeks (or months) and let search engines naturally index your web pages.
Or you can add some fuel to it and leverage social media to get your site indexed quicker.
Businesses have noticed that using their social media accounts have helped get their web pages indexed faster by Google.
Here’s how you can do it.
When a new piece of content is published on the website, immediately start sharing the post on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other platforms where your brand is active.
This social sharing gives some much-needed website clicks that send signals to Google that there is a web page that has to be crawled and indexed.
4. Using Social Media for SEO Content
Search engines consider multiple metrics like click-through rate, time on page, bounce rate, and more to rank content.
Brands can use their social media platforms to test and measure interactions and then develop strategies to boost engagement with their content when shared on their website.
Using social media platforms as a sounding board is an excellent strategy to analyze different types of content.
Study social posts that receive the highest level of engagement and use these insights to create SEO content.
The insights could include the content structure, SEO page title and meta description, type of language, and more.
Additionally, you can also determine topic clusters that your audience is most interested in and build them out on your website.
Using social media for SEO allows brands to create content that their audience engages with. This helps them generate relevant organic traffic and improve their conversion rate.
Here’s the thing.
Be it social media or Google, your end goal is to get people to click and read through your content.
Therefore, even if you change the channel, you can use tactics from one to improve your standing on another.
5. Establish authority
Sharing high-quality content consistently helps brands establish themselves as experts within their niche.
Over time, you build trust with the information you share, and this trust is reflected in how your audience perceives your brand.
This is excellent news for Google SEO.
One of the most significant algorithm updates by Google was the introduction to E-A-T.
E-A-T stands for expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.
Essentially, Google uses E-A-T to ensure that all the web pages ranking on the search engine share truthful, accurate, and valuable content with people.
Here’s what these terms stand for:
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Expertise. This factor accounts for the knowledge or experience of the author for the subject in question.
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Authority. The credibility of the website sharing the content.
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Trustworthiness. The trust people have in the brand/website.
E-A-T is a crucial SEO factor, and it’s something that builds over time for any website.
Publishing high-quality and valuable content and gaining relevant backlinks is one way of improving your E-A-T.
Social media has a huge role to play when it comes to your brand’s authority and trustworthiness.
One way of using social media for SEO is working with influencers to meet the E-A-T guidelines.
Let’s suppose you are trying to rank for a competitive search term like “backlinking tool.”
If experts in the niche like Neil Patel and Ryan Stewart mention your tool, it’ll definitely have a huge impact on your E-A-T.
This shows Google that your tool is a fresh product gaining traction in the market and is excellently positioned for people searching for a “backlinking tool.” This becomes even more powerful backed by recommendations from industry experts that Google highly trusts!
Summary
Social media can be a powerful tool to improve your site’s SEO positioning if you know how to do it right.
Businesses should focus on connecting with a highly-relevant audience and building meaningful relationships with industry experts and audiences alike.
However, before anything else, prioritize creating quality content that both social media and SEO will love.
Alongside having a solid social media strategy, businesses should put in some direct efforts into improving their website’s SEO.
This means creating an SEO campaign that targets aspects like technical SEO, on-page and off-page optimization, content gap analysis, keyword research, and more.
If you need some guidance building an SEO campaign that works for your business, you can book a free, no-strings-attached discovery call with one of our experts.
