Social Media Factors That Impact SEO

Social media is often an overlooked part of SEO, yet it plays an important part in ranking your website in the search. Working on your business’ social media profile not only helps your business rank better in the search, but it can also:

• Brand your business
• Increase social proof
• Build an online community
• Increase website traffic

If your business is using SEO and social media as part of their online marketing strategy, then using the right methods allows them to complement the other.

There are more than a dozen social media factors that impact SEO.

Some of the most important ones to leverage are:

Amount of social shares

Post shares are a signal to search engines that users value your content. After all, you wouldn’t share a piece of content on your Facebook wall if it wasn’t offering some form of value. The more comments, shares, and likes a post gains, the better that page will rank for SEO.

Tip: It’s worth promoting your most successful blog posts to increase the number of interactions.

Tip 2: As a standard feature on your blog, you should have social media share buttons.  This makes it easy for readers to share your content.

Social sentiment

This is what fans, customers, and users are saying about your brand online. Comments made on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and other forums are constantly crawled by search engines. The consistent and regular use and mention of your brand generates a positive SEO signal.

This is much harder to keep under your control, as you can’t influence what others write about your business. The best thing you can do is provide a great product or service to ensure the social sentiment will be positive.

Popularity of business social media profiles

The amount of fans on your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn company pages impact your website’s SEO and social proof. A steady increase in followers sends positive signals to search engines that your business is growing in popularity, and that you’re active online (search engines favor active businesses).

Tip: Don’t buy fake likes for your social profiles to boost your SEO. Not only is it against the rules on most social media sites, but you’ll negatively brand your business when you have a fan page of 100,000 likes but only two fans like your last post.

Learn more about social media for SEO

Is your business active on social media? Do you know whether you’re running your strategy correctly to also improve your SEO?

Find out how to improve your social media marketing strategy for SEO by reading our free 200+ Search Ranking Factors to Test Your Website.

In this guide, you’ll learn over 200 SEO ranking factors that will improve your website’s search presence, including every important social media factor.