Social Media and SEO: 3 Ways To Boost Search Results

Boost Search Results

 Social Media and SEO: 3 Ways To Boost Search Results

You want as many eyes as possible on your website – whether your goal is to sell your products, promote your services, or, you know, provide the world’s best digital marketing. There are lots of ways to drive traffic to your site, but Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has long stood alone as the most effective avenue to boost search results for business.

Now we’re asking – Can social media directly boost SEO?

Even though social signals like reviews, likes, shares, votes, pins, or links don’t have a direct impact on search rankings, there’s still a strong correlation between those signals and organic search success. What’s more, both SEO and social media have access to tons of marketing data you’ve been collecting for years.

Why not use it to grow and inform both channels?

Here’s how social media can bring more visitors to your website and improve the rankings that get your brand recognized and known.

Brand Recognition

Brand awareness may be the most touted benefit of social media, but we aren’t just talking about gauging your success by popularity metrics.

When someone discovers something on social media, what do they do?

They share a link. They mention your brand name. They write a review.

Although Google’s Matt Cutts debunked the myth that social following and likes played a role in ranking algorithms, getting a lot of mentions online could still cause Google to take notice.

With enough online chatter, Google sees brands as relevant for specific queries and begins ranking them for those queries.

Quality follows also benefit SEO – being followed by 100 people is better than 10,000 if it includes the top 5 influencers in your industry who publish content on a regular basis. A growing partnership on social media can blast your brand to a wider audience and work in the more technical space outside of those platforms.

As you help them with link building from guest posts on large blogs, you’ll likely gain valuable backlinks as a result.

Content Promotion

Social media is often ignored for SEO purposes because links from social platforms are rel=nofollow. In other words, search engines are instructed to ignore the link for ranking purposes in the search engine’s index.

However, it doesn’t matter that much.

If you’re earning nofollow links on high-profile platforms, you’re earning brand exposure, referral traffic and various off-site signals that do help your rankings in the search results.

That means you want to create and promote content that people want. Your brand should have a social promotion strategy for your videos, blog posts, and guides, in addition to a list of your very best evergreen content for re-sharing purposes.

These days, only a small portion of your potential audience sees your posts on a given day, so recycling content is the best way to continue driving traffic to your site.

While the links from social shares may not have the same SEO value as backlinks from authoritative websites, they can impact on-site engagement and bounce rate. There’s no better way to improve your site’s authority than delivering killer content that keeps visitors from wanting to leave your page.

Social media just offers another way to deliver that content.

Local SEO

Simply put, Google (and other search engines like Yahoo and Bing) like reviews. In fact, they make up 13 percent of ranking factors for local searches and seven percent for general searches. Customer reviews on your Google My Business listing reinforces that your business does what it says.

The same is true with Facebook business reviews. While Google likes its own content, it also pulls from other reliable sources to validate the information directly provided on your GMB listing.

That’s why your social media-sourced reviews are linked under the subheading “Reviews from the web” on Google.

Taking proper measures by using location tags can help send location-based signals to search engines that can strengthen your visibility. Consistent business name, address, and phone number (NAP) across your website, business listings and local directories is one way to ensure accurate search results.

You may also try location-based hashtags to get your website discovered and boost search results — #Chicago.

Takeaways

Social media may not have a direct and immediate impact on your search rankings but leveraging both strategies will give you more chances for audiences to discover your brand.

Partnering social platforms with SEO can build site authority, earn backlinks, promote your content and guide local prospects to discover your brand. With these tips in mind, you’ll more easily manage your social media while boosting your SEO (indirectly) at the same time.

Want more insights? Contact our digital marketing experts at RLC Media to start growing your online business today.
Boost Search Results.