How Does Social Media Benefit Your SEO Campaign?

Although social media signals are not direct ranking factors in determining organic listings in search engines, your SEO campaign can benefit from use of social media channels in the right way.

By using social media marketing alongside your SEO strategy, your organic rankings can be indirectly affected and boosted. In this article we outline some of the ways this can work.

Social Links Help Content Get Indexed Quickly

Social media shares can help get your content or pages get indexed by search engines considerably faster. Crawlers follow links to find new content. The higher the number of links leading to a page, the quicker the search engines will be able to find and index the content.

Social media provides the opportunity to quickly share and generate links instantly, and therefore help with the indexing process.

Creates a Brand Awareness

Social media is a great way to build up an awareness and reputation for your brand, through engaging with potential customers or influencers, and actively promoting your content and business. Building a strong presence on social networks can help create a buzz around your brand, and lead to users searching for your brand name or domain in the search engines.

Social Media Sites Rank Well

When searching for a brand name in Google, social media profiles such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn tend to be among the top results displayed. By having profiles in all these major social channels, your brand visibility is increased not only in the channels themselves, but the organic search landscape.

With news of the deal between Google and Twitter to show tweets within search results instantly, ensuring a Twitter presence for your brand should be considered a must.

Social Sharing Can Lead to Links

By sharing content from your website on your social media profiles, you are increasing its reach and potential. The post could be shared by your followers and even by your followers’ followers, creating an expanded audience for your content.

If seen by the right eyes, you could gain a link back to your website from someone else’s article or post that your content may have influenced. As you probably know, links are a valuable factor in determining SEO rankings.

Increased Authority and Traffic

• With each social media post that is shared, comes increased authority and trust for your brand.
• Posts that lead people to visit your website will increase site traffic.

Domain authority and increased visitors help show search engines that users find your website relevant and useful, which can lead to increased search engine rankings.

Google+ Influences Personalised Results

Google+ can affect a user’s personalised Google search results. If you have posted a post on Google+ about a particular topic, and one of your followers searches for a related phrase to this topic in Google search, your post will be displayed in their results. Although a very targeted way to gain extra visibility, your visibility is still increased nonetheless.

This shows the value then, of building up a large audience and following on Google+, to increase the likelihood of your posts appearing in personalised search results.

Google+ Helps Local Search

A Google+ profile for local businesses should be considered an essential. Google+ Local listings can have a significant impact on local search rankings, with reviews, +1’s and fully completed profiles helping to increase local search visibility in both Google+ and Google search.

Opportunity for Keyword Promotion

Using the right keywords and phrases in your SEO campaign is vital. By using your main targeted keywords within social media posts, you will help create an authority and relevancy on a given topic. Users coming to your website from these posts will help show search engines that your website is valuable in association with this topic.

Conclusion

Although currently social media presence does not directly affect the search results, as you can see above, there are a number of ways that a social media marketing strategy can indeed benefit your SEO performance.

A holistic approach to digital marketing can greatly improve the visibility of your brand and its website online. Gain the advantage over your competitors by placing your eggs in different baskets and combining approaches into a wider digital strategy.