Social Media Websites For SEO
Discover the best social media sites that can help improve a brand’s SEO so you can focus your energies on the right social media networks that can help drive traffic to your business.
We'll cover the following
High-ranking websites often have an active presence on several social media sites at a time. Just look up a brand name on Google and we’ll find a list of business profiles they have on different platforms besides their official website. Potential buyers often visit these profiles to connect with the brand and find out more about them.
Our social media profile humanizes our brand, offering a place where we can interact with our audience in ways that’s not typically possible through our website. When working on a website’s SEO, certain social media websites offer more value than others. Social media websites that rank high in search results should be the ones we should be targeting. Naturally, top-ranking social media platforms can give the biggest boost to our site’s SEO.
Choosing the best social media for SEO
Someone researching our brand on Google will see our profiles on all the top-ranking social media platforms, so we should have an active profile on all of these sites.
At the same time, we probably need to put a bigger focus on the social networking sites where our target audience typically hangs out. An analysis of their age groups, jobs, interests, location, and other demographics will tell us where we’ll find the audience most interested in our business. For example, LinkedIn typically appeals to professionals, while Instagram and Twitter majorly attract the younger generation.
For now, let’s focus on all the top-ranking social media sites since they can all positively impact our SEO.
X (formerly Twitter)
X has one of the biggest social media audiences. If our business doesn’t have a profile on X, our overall SEO is still lacking. Though X primarily discusses news and events around the world, it is also an excellent platform to share our content and promote our brand.
X is much more than an additional URL that ranks for our brand name. Google has a special partnership with X allowing the search engine to index and display Tweets in SERPs as X result packs. This SERP feature lets users scroll through the latest Tweets from the ranking Twitter account along with pictures and GIFs associated with the Tweets.
Manage your X profile regularly. Tweet often, posting engaging content each time. Add visuals to strengthen their impact.
Include links back to relevant pages on our website. Though links on X have a nofollow tag, preventing them from passing PageRank to our site’s pages, they’re still powerful in building referral traffic to our website. However, links with every Tweet, and pointing to the homepage every time may come across as spammy.
Strategic use of hashtags can help the target audience find our Tweets quickly. The likes, retweets, and comments we generate from our Tweets will help our brand grow and build traffic to our website.
Every once in a while, we can review our X performance by visiting Twitter Analytics. The report shows us our Top Tweets, engagement rates, retweets, link clicks, and other demographics that can help us revamp our Twitter activity.
Facebook is the most popular social media website in the world, with over 2.89 billion monthly active users according to Statista [57].
Semrush shows that the website gets 3.2 billion organic search traffic per month on average:
Having an attractive company page on Facebook where we regularly interact with followers can be a big plus for our SEO.
Though Facebook profiles and pages were blocked for search engines in the past, Facebook has allowed Google to crawl and index its pages since 2007. As of 2011, Facebook comments are also open to Google. As a result of these updates, Facebook pages appear in SERPs for related search queries. This gives SEO professionals all the more reason to use Facebook to promote their brand.
Searching for a keyword, the company’s Facebook profile is among the top results in the SERPs. The snippet also shows additional information to the users, including likes and audience size - something potential customers will quickly notice when researching our brand.
While it’s unclear whether Google uses Facebook likes and shares in their ranking algorithms - Matt Cutts stated it doesn’t [56]- having a strong company page on Facebook can be very effective for website promotion and building traffic.
Keep tabs on our company’s Facebook page. Regularly share content from our website to our Facebook page and use keywords to optimize our posts. Adding links to our business website is also a good practice. Posting our site’s content to our Facebook page exposes it to a bigger audience. At the same time, it also encourages social engagement around the shared content. The likes, comments, and shares all add up to the content’s popularity.
Besides posting promotional content, keep our visitors to the Facebook page engaged by frequently posting valuable non-promotional content as well. For instance, our audience will enjoy seeing some inspirational quotes and appealing photos every once in a while.
With over 810 million members, LinkedIn is the most popular social site among professionals. Though it’s primarily used for connecting job seekers and employers, it’s also an excellent platform for businesses looking to generate leads. B2B business marketers are especially likely to include LinkedIn in their marketing strategy. These businesses can leverage the resource for brand awareness and lead generation. In fact, B2B marketers get 80% of their social media leads from LinkedIn [58].
If we are trying to improve our business’s visibility in search engines, set up an account on LinkedIn. Optimize the company page and posts with keywords, create backlinks to our website’s pages, and post engaging content consistently. Keep the profile updated with the latest stance of our business.
Another important thing is to keep track of our performance on the platform. LinkedIn’s analytics reports are particularly useful in gathering insights to improve our marketing efforts. The reports help us identify the kind of posts that receive the most engagement from the audience. Moreover, we can gather the demographics of our followers to fuel our content generation to target the people most interested in our business.
YouTube
If we are looking to build a brand, we should have a channel on YouTube. It’s the second most used search engine in the world, after Google. Other than its own set of searchers, YouTube videos also appear in Google search results.
Keep in mind that YouTube searchers aren't typically looking for promotional content. Generate creative, unique video content that aligns with our audience’s interests. The strategic use of keywords in the video title and description will further help it rank in search results. Remember to add a link back to the website in the video description. The more interesting our videos are, the more people will be inclined to learn more about us by clicking on our website link.
Points to ponder
Are there any other social media sites to target for SEO?
Test your knowledge
Choose the correct answer for each of the following questions.
How does Facebook impact SEO?
Facebook pages do not appear in search engine results.
Facebook likes and shares are significant ranking factors.
Facebook comments are blocked for search engines.
Facebook allows Google to crawl and index its pages.
Get hands-on with 1300+ tech skills courses.