Social Media and SEO

Explore how to use social media to extend your off-page SEO endeavors, leveraging unique opportunities to engage with potential customers and visitors to your site.

Social media is an integral part of our lifestyle. Its popularity has been growing steeply since its inception. As of January 2022, 58.4% of the world’s population uses at least one social media platform. On average, a person spends 2 hours and 27 minutes on social media [55].

Where social media takes such a big chunk of internet usage today, it’s almost impossible to ignore it in our digital marketing efforts. An active presence on social media can put our brand in front of a bigger audience. High-ranking websites typically have a strong social media presence. There must be a connection.

What is social media SEO?

The strong connection between social media and SEO gives rise to a new term—social media SEO. Social media SEO refers to the set of activities performed on social media to boost our website’s rank in search engines.

Point to ponder

Question

Does social media impact search engine ranking?

Show Answer

How does social media help SEO

It improves our site’s SEO in the following ways:

Increases brand awareness

An active profile on social media platforms makes our brand visible to a larger group of people. Creating posts and responding directly to our customers increases our brand exposure. More people will know about us, talk about us with friends, and possibly even do business with us.

A social profile with a large following on social media, such as the one below, is likely to build a bigger customer base as well.

Press + to interact
An example of a brand awareness
An example of a brand awareness

Offers an opportunity to generate backlinks

While social signals may not be a direct ranking factor, backlinks are a strong ranking factor. The same video, referenced above, that states social signals don’t influence web search ranking algorithms, also mentions that X (formerly Twitter), Facebook and other social networking websites are crawled just like any other website. Backlinks from these websites, though not as valuable as those from other authoritative sites, are easy to build and can improve our site’s ranking in search engines.

Social media websites are an important ally for content promotion. When we share our site’s content on social media, we increase its visibility, especially if we already have a large following. If one of our followers shares the post, it’s visible to all of his followers, and the cycle continues. Someone, at some point, may even like the post enough to link it on their website, winning us a stronger backlink.

The more social shares our content gets, the more people see it and the bigger the opportunity for people to link to it. Not to mention, the quality of content is still a huge factor in generating links this way. People will only share it and link to it if they like it enough.

Drives more traffic to our site

The goal of SEO is to increase our site’s organic visibility in search engines to drive more targeted visitors to our site. Though social media activities may not directly impact our visibility in search engines, it still helps achieve the end goal—drive traffic to our website.

By posting content our target audience is interested in and responding to them actively and positively, we can attract more visitors to our site. In fact, social media is becoming a faster way to attract traffic than search engines. New businesses will have to put in months of hard work in building their site’s SEO before their site shows up in search results. While it is absolutely necessary to have a place in SERPs, we can start attracting social media traffic to our website much sooner than search engine traffic.

More and more people look beyond search engines to find answers to their queries today. X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and other channels have their own search engines. For example, someone looking for digital marketing services may enter the keywords into the X (formerly Twitter) search, scroll through the top Tweets, and reach out to a company with a particularly convincing Tweet, or a high number of comments, retweets, likes, or shares.

Social profiles can rank for branded searches

When people look up our brand name on Google, our website isn’t the only result that will show up. Our social profiles are also often among the top results for branded searches. Typing Educative into Google, for example, shows the company’s website on top, but it also ranks its social profiles on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn on the first page.

Press + to interact
An example of social profiles on Google search result
An example of social profiles on Google search result

People researching our brand aren’t always going to go to our website. Some of them might click on our social profile. So, while our business’s website should be attractive to the visitors, don’t neglect social profiles either. A profile that hasn’t been maintained in months and lacks fresh posts and interaction puts off visitors.

Builds trust and brand reputation

In many ways, social profiles offer a deeper look into our business than our website. Potential customers may visit our social profiles to see our activities, the size of our following, and what customers are saying about us. A strong social media presence with compelling posts and professional communication with customers tells the audience that our brand is reliable and that they can put their trust in us.

Google might not take into account these social signals to generate our rank in SERPs, but users are highly likely to use these when deciding to do business with us. Social profiles offer additional context to potential customers to help them build trust in our brand.

If we are looking to boost the trust and reputation of our brand among our audience, social media is one of the key tools to use.

Enhances customer services

If someone wants to contact us, one of the easiest ways is to get hold of us on our Facebook page, but that’s only possible if we’re active on it. Many customers, who are not patient enough to wait for a reply over the email, choose to contact brands on their social profiles.

These profiles are an important customer services platform, and shouldn’t be ignored if we want to maintain customer satisfaction. We know that we’re not the only one that’s offering the product or service. There are thousands of other brands offering the same. If customers aren’t satisfied completely, they’ll move on to the next seller. Respond to their queries quickly and professionally so they won’t find a reason to look elsewhere.

It’s settled that social media benefits our site’s SEO in multiple indirect ways, if not directly. This makes social media a crucial element of any SEO project.

Test your knowledge

Choose the correct answer for each of the following questions.

1

Why are backlinks from social media platforms valuable for SEO?

A)

They are considered high-quality backlinks.

B)

They are difficult to obtain.

C)

They are immune to algorithm changes.

D)

They are easy to build and can improve website ranking.

Question 1 of 30 attempted

Get hands-on with 1300+ tech skills courses.