Social media is often used to improve SEO efforts. Even though it doesn’t directly influence your ranking, it’s an essential part of every serious digital marketing campaign. In essence, social media can help your SEO results by increasing your website visibility and organic traffic. Meanwhile, it gives your content greater exposure and sends signals to search engines that your posts are relevant and useful. If you carefully manage your social media profiles, you will be able to boost your SEO simultaneously.
Social media can help your SEO results in several ways
If you are struggling with social media and trying to understand if it can help you, let’s make it a bit more understandable. It’s clear that social media can’t directly influence your SEO. However, numerous social signals like sharing, liking, and following have an indirect influence. The main reason behind this is the simple fact that social signals can be manipulated. But, since search engines can crawl social media platforms, it allows them to impact factors that influence rankings.
To explain it a bit further, here are several examples of how social media can help your SEO:
- Social media helps driving traffic to your website
- It helps with sharing your content
- Grows your targeted audience and link building opportunities
- Allows you to engage with your followers directly
- It helps you build authority
- Social media can be great for local SEO
Social media helps driving traffic to your website
Besides different proven techniques, such as link building, that can help you improve ranking in a safe way, you can use social media to spread your content. Once interested sides discover your content, they can share it further. This exposes your content to a wider audience, inevitably leading to an additional increase in traffic. However, the primary importance is to provide your readers with quality content. The more value they find in your content, the better chance they will share it with others, and so on. Eventually, this leads to exponential traffic growth with an increased opportunity to generate valuable backlinks.
It helps with sharing your content
From articles to videos, every type of content has a goal to provide valuable information to your audience. In most cases, search engines are responsible for the organic discovery of your content. But, you can use social media to push things a bit further. With the possibility of sharing content with each other, social media users can amplify the content visibility. And when others spend enough time reading and sharing, it signals search engines that your pages are valuable. As a result, they will rank your pages higher.
Grows your targeted audience and link building opportunities
One way social media help your SEO is by helping you grow your targeted audience. The more followers you have on your social media profile, the more people will see your content. However, among those people are often influencers, businessmen, and other website owners. This gives you the chance to tap into the right type of backlink opportunities. Basically, once they find your posts, pages, and articles interesting, it will encourage them to link to you. Again, the main prerequisite is to provide them with high-quality and authoritative content.
Social media allow you to engage with your followers directly
Obviously, one of the main characteristics of social media is direct interaction with your audience. Being in direct contact with your followers will enable you to build relationships with them but also create a good reputation for your website, brand, and business in general. With such a personal connection to them, you increase the chance they will share a positive image of you.
Helps you build authority
Social media channels are responsible for the distribution of a large portion of content over the internet. This makes maintaining an image of a credible and authoritative source of information for you quite important. The level of authority you acquire on social media can directly affect how others perceive you and their willingness to value and share your content further. This is another self-growing circle SEO can use, assuming your content has enough power to start the process.
Social media can be great for local SEO
Besides the obvious fact that you can use social media for promotion, there are other hidden benefits. If you want to spread your brand awareness, especially on a local level, these channels are an excellent place for it. They allow you to target area-specific keywords and engage in active local communities and groups. By building solid relations on local levels, you send search engines a clear signal you are valuable for their geographical searches. Eventually, people looking for information, service, and products on a local level will have an easier time finding you.
Some of the best social media platforms for SEO
Here are some of the most popular social media platforms you can use to boost your SEO:
Probably the most popular platform, Facebook is a great place to post and share different content. Given that Google indexes and crawls pages and links on Facebook, it can significantly help your SEO.
When you need a more business-oriented platform, LinkedIn is a place to go. For this reason, a large percentage of businesses and marketers are using LinkedIn to generate leads.
Medium
Overall, Medium is a place where you can find all types of mixed content. From personal stories to professional guides, everything is there. By not being tightly connected to a particular branch, a Medium is a great place for starters to reach a wider audience.
With their “hashtag” methodology, Twitter allows you to share and find different posts quickly. When you need a place to share your links or engage with the audience frequently, this is the right one. Because it also sends signals to search engines, it can help you with your ranking positions.
Probably the most creative social media platform, Pinterest is a combination of search engines and social media. Basically, anyone that has anything from an idea to a product can use Pinterest for promotion. It is worth remembering that people often use this platform when looking for inspiration or when deciding on buying some products.