Social Media Marketing and SEO Work Best Together

You may be forgiven for thinking that updating your Twitter timeline or Facebook page has no effect on your search engine ranking. After all, they’re two entirely different things. Aren’t they? There has been a fair amount of discussion amongst marketers recently, some saying the effect is negligible, others stating that it is actually more nuanced.

The truth is that search engines like Google may not yet be taking into account all those likes and retweets but there are a number of ways that engaging with social media is also going to improve SEO.

Creating Links

Inbound links (from high reputation websites) are a staple of building good SEO. There are two ways to create these: You can either contact sites directly and ask them to link back to your site, or it can happen more organically, via social media, when you publish something which is useful.

Let’s say you write a blog post about your product or service that provides tips on how to use it better. You then tweet a teaser about this blog post with a link back to the full article which, in turn, is retweeted by your followers. Someone sees the retweet, likes what you have to say and writes a blog post on their site that links back to your original blog page. That’s 2 links to your site that would not have been created had you not used social media. Social Media Marketing and SEO Work Best Together!

Brand Awareness

Using social media effectively can help to create much more brand awareness than a static blog or website. If more people are becoming aware of your brand and regularly search for news about you then you will rank higher on search engines.

Being mentioned on a website without a link, according to some experts, can also make the likes of Google look more favourably upon your brand. Google generally considers this kind of thing as ‘co-citation’ and it is logged as a brand signal.

Traffic

One of the drivers for SEO is the amount of traffic heading to your site. Consequently, being well connected on social media will drive more traffic to your site and thus, hopefully, increase that search engine ranking. The trick to this is having content which is interesting enough for visitors to stay and read. For example, if you have a video on your site and people watch it all the way through (rather than bounce straight out) then that makes you more likely to achieve good organic results.

Putting it simply, great content + social media = better website engagement = improved ranking.

Authority

Google are trying to work out how they give authority to certain individuals through their authorship algorithm and it could have a big impact in the future. Adding Google authorship to your blog posts should set you up as an authority in your field if you produce content on a regular basis, meaning that you get a higher ranking on the search engine.

It’s Not Just About Google (but don’t tell Google I said that! shh!)

It’s easy to tie all our SEO activity into Google because it’s the most popular engine out there with nearly 70% of search activity. But did you know that YouTube is the second most popular search engine? And what about Twitter? It receives over 2 billion queries a day. Social Media Marketing and SEO Work Best Together! The truth is that, as we head into the marketing future, organic SEO and social media are becoming more and more closely inter-linked and brands that ignore this fact are likely to be left behind.