How Does Social Media Help Your SEO? An In-Depth Guide
Social media is a powerful tool for your business and marketing strategy. Although social media isn’t a direct ranking factor, utilized correctly, it can help influence your SEO ranking and reach future customers quite effectively.
Although social shares are not confirmed to have an effect on your SEO, social media can help drive traffic back to your site and create authority for your URL and website. The traffic matters. To help drive traffic, you need to create and share content that engages your users. Let’s explore these top six social media platforms and how to implement them into your SEO strategy to drive more qualified traffic back to your website.
Table of contents:
- Why is Social Media Important for SEO?
- How to Improve SEO with Social Media Using These 6 Profiles
- Helpful Tips for Creating Effective SEO Social Media Posts
- Common Questions About Social Media and SEO
Why is Social Media Important for SEO?
Your social media profiles indirectly influence your search rankings. They are a powerful tool you can use to drive high quality traffic back to your content and website, thru both paid and organic channels. When your content is relevant to your target audience, this helps you build a lasting relationship that keeps them returning to your website.
How Can Your SEO Improve with Social Media?
With the help of a strong social presence, here’s how your social media efforts can feed into your SEO strategy to increase your visibility. Your social media:
- Can increase your content performance
- Gives you opportunities to obtain more qualified traffic
- Increases your brand awareness
- Gets more advocates for your business (social shares from others)
- Gives you potential to receive more quality backlinks
- Can help your well-optimized social media profiles rank organically for search terms
If you’re not incorporating social media into your content planning and strategy to help impact SEO, start now!
How to Improve SEO with Social Media Using These 6 Profiles
With almost 3 billion users, Facebook is still one of the most popular social media platforms. This is a great place for your business to build an audience. That many users means you can connect with a larger group of people and potential customers. On Facebook, you can share announcements, special deals, and connect with your customers. It is also a great way to syndicate the content on your site.
When writing copy and lead-ins as you share your posts, make sure to use phrases that have a call-to-action. For example, use enticing phrases like “check this out” or “click here to learn more!” Asking questions that encourage engagement is also a great way to get more engagement. Words like this pull in your customers and you can increase the clicks on your content, driving traffic to your website. Update your user profile with business information, hours of operation, and a link back to your site. This will help drive traffic and create authority.
As long as your content is interesting, engaging and relevant, it has a good chance of making the rounds on Facebook, bringing in a wider audience. Content quality is an essential factor in SEO ranking. Therefore, share relevant, accurate, and useful information on Facebook. This will bring users to your site to help establish authority.
LinkedIn has a high domain authority. User profiles and content posted on LinkedIn often ranks well organically on Google. LinkedIn has a business professional audience, so the content you share should reflect the interest of that audience. To be relevant and competitive on the platform, make sure your business profile is completed in detail. Be thorough in the keywords and descriptions on your business summary profile. As is with every social profile, provide a link back to your website. Focus on the user intent and your specific audience when choosing the right keywords to use throughout your profile.
Engage and interact with other businesses and consumers to increase your visibility and establish brand trust. Sharing your content on your account is also important. As usual, make sure you share quality content to your site that attracts your audience and addresses the needs and interests of your audience. Write catchy copy and lead-ins to help grab attention and drive traffic back to your site.
Interested in growing your LinkedIn profile? Learn how partnering with LinkedIn influencers can help!
With a post character limit of 240 and over 200 million users, Twitter is a great place for consumers and businesses to connect and communicate quickly and efficiently. Add important keywords in your bio and tweets. Better keywords will increase the chances of users finding your business. If your information is up-to-date on your profile, this can lead them back to your site.
Following and interacting with other businesses on your account helps build your following as well as your brand loyalty and trust. This in turn can build your audience and generate more traffic. Building positive relationships with other businesses can lead to content sharing, likes, and retweets that will increase your reach to brand new audiences.
Content sharing is also extremely valuable on Twitter. The more retweets and likes you get, the more your audience grows and authority builds with your traffic. Hashtags are also an extremely resourceful tool. As you post your content, relevant and creative hashtags can bring your content to the right audience searching for your product. Create your hashtags similarly to how you would your keywords. Make sure they are unique and specific to your brand.
Instagram is a highly visual platform where you can share rich images and videos. With a user experience different from other text heavy social platforms, it still has the ability to drive traffic back to your site. Create a username with your primary keyword and use your secondary keywords in your bio. This will help your account show up in the search results for suggested accounts.
Post high quality photos and illustrations that are relevant to your brand. Make sure your content provides a purpose for your followers and customers. Instagram doesn’t allow users to post links directly into your copy so utilize a trusted link sharing option in your bio (i.e. linktr.ee and linkin.bio) where you can keep the important URLs associated with your website. This process does create added steps for your users to find your site, so make sure the copy in your posts are catchy, conversational, and sincere. Use your secondary keywords in your copy and treat your hashtags like keywords to help draw users to your posts. You want to grab the attention with your photos and make sure the copy gives the users a reason to want to visit your site (use a call-to-action).
Pinterest may not be your traditional social media platform, but depending on your industry, it can be a gold mine of intent-driven traffic for your products and services! It’s both a social media platform that can help SEO efforts grow, as well as a search engine. Users on Pinterest spend 2x more than users on other platforms every month and they intend to shop when visiting the platform. This is a great opportunity to utilize their tools to bring users to your site not only to help your SEO but to increase conversions.
As with any social platform, optimize your profile with your business information. Post relevant and helpful images and content. Use the Pinterest hashtag feed. You can add up to twenty hashtags to a pin description and this will in turn give weighted priority in their algorithm. Consistently pinning quality content with good engagement will increase your exposure. Pinterest considers keywords you use in your pins and descriptions so make sure to use relevant keywords pertaining to your pins.
Check out this helpful Pinterest optimization guide here.
Medium
Medium is a digital publishing website and although it is not a social media platform, it is an excellent spot to publish your content when it may not be getting in front of your target audience. With over 150 million unique monthly visitors, Medium carries good authority and a lot of the content ranks well on Google. Publishing your content on Medium can give it the boost it needs on the SERP, which will in turn bring more users back to your website.
Medium is a great tool to add to your content marketing and SEO strategy as it helps you reach audiences you may not have found on your social media profiles and blog.
Helpful Tips for Creating Effective SEO Social Media Posts
As each social media platform requires their own strategy, it may seem overwhelming. Here are some helpful tips to consider for your strategy that can help increase engagement, authority, and brand recognition:
- Quality over quantity. Share useful and relevant content, materials, and tools aimed to help users and increase engagement. High quality content with intent-driven keywords will help your social media SEO by increasing your profile’s rank in Google search results as well as help you increase followers (which increases your audience).
- Engaging content leads to users sharing your content which leads to more traffic to your site from a wider audience. Make it easy for people to share your posts.
- When you share high quality content, even if it’s not something you created yourself, helps establish a trusted brand and reputation
- Links from social media can help Google with indexing your content, which leads to more traffic from search to help improve your rankings.
- Utilize the skyscraper technique for your content strategy:
- Find relevant content (from your competitors or for a keyword you want to rank for) that is ranking and performing well.
- Create similar content that is better quality than the original content.
- Send your updated content to people referencing your competitor’s and request that they update their backlink with yours because your piece is more valuable.
- Make sure to use relevant keywords, materials, and images/visuals to increase relevance and authority.
- Share the content yourself and have them share the content with their users on social media that provides the link back to your website.
Common Questions About Social Media and SEO
Is Social Media a Google Ranking Factor?
Social media is not a direct ranking factor but it can often have an indirect positive impact on SEO.
A link to a post or a page on your website from a social media post doesn’t transfer over authority like a traditional backlink would from a third-party website. However, if your page gets a lot of intent-driven and valuable traffic to the page, it does help your SEO efforts by showing that people find value in the content and seek out this page. Therefore, Google will want to rank this page so more people can see it.
What Types of Content Increase Traffic and Social Shares?
Here are the types of articles and posts that tend to perform best on social media:
- Engaging videos
- Skyscraper content
- How-to videos and blogs with step-by-step instructions
- Eye-catching images and design
- Informative infographics
- Your own original research and data
- Re-sharing engaging posts from professionals in your industry
Driving Qualified Traffic Matters for Social Media and SEO
Manage your brand and content for all your social media accounts. Social media can positively impact SEO through consistent content and good quality keywords that drive traffic back to your site. Even if the social shares don’t necessarily help your rankings directly, they can increase traffic.
You want your audience to click on your social posts that go back to your site because that’s the win. And our affordable SEO services for small businesses at Boostability are here to supplement your social media efforts. Every five minutes we help a small business reach the first page of a Google search. So let’s team up to help your small business grow! Contact us today with any questions or if you would like to speak with one of our digital marketing experts.
