5 Ways Social Media Can Boost your SEO

5 Ways Social Media Can Boost your SEO

Social media and SEO are becoming increasingly entwined and relevant to each other.

While it was previously the case that these two areas were separate and did not have popular overlap the increase in the number of social media platforms and the spread of their use has pushed these two areas together.

It is now the case that social is vying with digital as the top priority for many marketers and marketing companies and more are coming to the understanding of what SEO can do in combination with a robust social media presence and strategy. SEO and social together can result in increases in page rankings, followers, and presence in a shorter space of time than would be feasible if either was done alone.

As a result, it’s clear to see why many companies are scrambling to change their campaigns and strategies to incorporate this unique relationship.

Today we will list five examples of how you can improve your presence and engagement with smart combinations of social and SEO.

Let’s get started.

1. Contacting Influencers Gives SEO Gains

It’s a well-known fact that SEO benefits hugely by embedding high-quality links into content and pages. Further referencing of this content by other websites that are themselves well-ranked on Google is a goal of SEO. It is also a fantastic method of kick-starting a new campaign or SEO focus.

If you make a habit of putting content onto your social platforms and asking your followers to share it, you spread your message across a much wider audience.

The issue here naturally moves onto the need for high-quality and original content. Social media and modern customers are a particularly fickle breed. If you request that information and links are shared but have poor-quality content you will very quickly frustrate your followers and alienate them from your brand.

Focus on having large companies with powerful social media pages link to your own pages, and you’ll instantly receive a positive SEO boost from Google. If your content is up to snuff you’ll be rewarded through practices like these. However, only if they are organic, original and engaging.

2. Social Works With Algorithms

Page ranking is increasingly incorporating Social aspects. Gone are the days when releases and updates from Google were simple and basic; they are increasingly complex and ingenious. It is the maturing of these over time that allowed the intelligent incorporation of social data into page ranking.

This comes down to some very nifty keyword and link analysis which is used to work out who gets what. Google is active in the expansion of its services and search features. They have worked quite heavily on items like SideWiki and Social Search. All these services make active use of social media, with a particular focus on how actual visitors interact with their most frequently visited websites.

Updates from the big players like Google’s Caffeine update have pushed the social scene further into mainstream SEO and searching in a big way.

3. Follower Bases Give SEO Benefit

Your SERPS will rank much better if you have a good portion of high-quality followers. This means real people contribute or regularly view your pages.

The common thread shared between SEO and social is quality. You can’t purchase a thousand followers for a platform like Twitter at low cost and expect these to give you long-lasting benefits. Marketers are increasingly finding that budget on SEO techniques is far better spent on white hat high-quality content that will give them a benefit that won’t disappear soon after it arrives.

The interactions that drive quality in Google’s eyes can be simple platform-specific activities such as retweeting or reposting content and commenting on posts or liking them. Crawlers and bots pick up these signals and reward websites accordingly. This is a big deal when it comes to increasing rankings. It’s foolish for a marketer to overlook the benefits these signals yield.

It’s worth noting here that fooling search engine giants like Google with poor quality or purchased activity is not going to work. The best way to proceed is to embrace the system and drive high-quality engagement organically. Try to play the system and you’ll end up with a punishing blow to your page rank and a hole in your budget.

4. Social Can Help Link-Building Indirectly

Imagine that you own a store and have a great following on Facebook. Say your blog is shared 20 times, and one of these is from a senior manager on a highly ranked and top-quality website. What happens?

In this case, your article is used as a linked source in an article made and posted by that user. Suddenly, you are getting SEO benefits organically from a quality site. Multiply this over the scale of your social media engagement and it’s easy to see how vast the opportunity becomes.

5. Audience Engagement

This is critical for spreading brand awareness effectively. However, what many don’t know is that it links in neatly with SEO and page ranking boosts.

We all spend a lot of time looking for ways to increase our SEO success through new proactive methods. However, you can often increase your SEO effectiveness by reviewing the processes you already have in place.

What that means for audience engagement is knowing that you have a lot of engagement on certain content. While this is a good thing if you leave it without replying you will actually lose traction.

There is a lot of opportunity for the most valuable content in Google’s eyes to be pushed here. Of course, we´re talking about quality organic engagement and content.

With an eye on this topic and how you can link social to your SEO, you’ll naturally find yourself looking to details such as solid CRM systems to improve the ease and consistency with which you track and engage with your customers.

The summary

More things to monitor! Hurrah!

Generally speaking, every year we can see more and more angles with which to leverage SEO. The difficulty in keeping track of this is that a lot of the benefits available are through knock-on effects of engagement with followers and customers.. It’s not just a formula that you can use to understand a search engine or an algorithm. It means you need to be busy.

We agree that working your social and SEO alongside each other is no easy task. However, you’ll find yourself increasingly rewarded by activity that pushes quality content and real engagement. This has the benefit of providing a win-win situation for you and your customers. While they receive a great quality customer experience, you will reach SEO success from a variety of sources.