Does social media affect your SEO results? We say fact and fiction. Although social media doesn’t affect the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs) directly, it does have an impact on factors that affect the rankings. Improving your SEO strategy is crucial because it improves the visibility of your content and therefore makes it more likely that more people will visit your page. In the following 5 points, we will reveal several factors that can be influenced by using social media and we will provide some valuable tips to improve them.
Social media as Search engines
Google is not the only search engine people use, the different social platforms such as Instagram, Facebook or YouTube are often used by consumer as search engines. For example, when people search for a certain type of product, they often look browse through social media to see what their favourite influencers use. That’s why a social media presence is almost crucial for brands, just as the use of keyword hashtags, engaging content, and proper pin categorization. All these aspects can help drive views for your content.
Socials drive traffic
Typically, increasing visibility and attracting more visitors are the main goals of SEO. Traffic is one of the main ranking factors for measuring the SEO and especially if you are starting to build your content, social media can sometimes help to attract visitors faster than search engines. However, only being active on social media will not guarantee that your website will get a lot more traffic. To do that you must post the content your audience wants to see. As soon as people start sharing your social media content on their own profiles it will send more traffic to your social media and website, which will boost your rankings.
Increasing content reach
On search engines, your content will only be reached if someone uses the right
keywords. But on social media the algorithm will make sure new potential customers will discover your brand without even realizing they needed it. This means that your socials will have more visitors which leads to more traffic to your website.
Bots discover your website
Publishing the right kind of social media content regularly can significantly increase the impact of your overall marketing efforts. Posting your website link on your social media, will help the bots to discover your website. They will start crawling and indexing. For example, if your content receives lot of attention on Instagram of TikTok, it will be indexed much faster. However, there is no guarantee that every post you make will be indexed by Google. People searching for related content must be able to find it. For example, if you search Elon Musk, most of the first results are his social media, due to its relevance to the search query.
Best socials for SEO
Marketers should feel fortunate to have so many social media platforms to choose from for SEO nowadays! Apps and sites listed below make excellent SEO social media marketing channels, primarily due to their popularity and high search engine rankings.
- Quora
- YouTube
The advantage of social networks is the personal touch they offer, which makes them an ideal platform to express your brand.
In short, social media certainly has an indirect influence on your SEO strategy. Even though it might not directly affect the rankings, it will generate traffic to your website. Nevertheless, there is a lot of competition on every social media platform, that is why publishing relevant, high-quality content that is interesting to users is key. In order for your content to perform well on social media and SEO, it is imperative to do intensive research before even beginning creating the content.
Authors:
Katerina Bartakovicova, Lisa Jelsma, Romy Bogaars y Indy Van Gremberghen