Myriads of people think that social media and SEO work exclusively, or that they are separate entities.
On the surface, it may seem that SEO and social media work as competing strategies, one for web crawlers and one for humans.
But in reality, they want to achieve the same thing, namely; relevance for, and engagement from, your audience.
The connection between the two can be confusing. Do your social media signals impact your search rankings? Should your social team take a dip in your SEO pool?
Social signals may not impact your rankings directly according to Matt Cutts from Google, but they do have a significant impact on your SEO.
Way back in 2013 Econsultancy's found through their State of Search Marketing Research that 82% of agencies and 74% of companies integrate social media in their SEO strategy.
But not all SEO is good SEO, going into 2019, you should know which SEO tactics you need to avoid.
External Link Building
Influencers use social media more than anyone else (if not just as much) since social media can lead to high-quality links which are authentic.If you post content on the same channels that your influencers are on, there's a good chance that they will see your content and link to it from their own websites and blogs.Enhanced social shares mean enhanced visibility.
Social Links
Since social media signals are way too easy to manipulate, hence, Google doesn't have a lot of confidence in them. Google knows that it is very easy to create links on social networks, thus, not all of these links are considered the same as high-quality links from websites.So, social signals that pertain to the authority of profiles are out, but what about links that are published on social accounts to be credible backlinks? Or when a post or a blog go viral on Twitter? Do these new links affect or boost the post's search ranking?Well, according to Brian Honigman, links to your websites via social media accounts do have an impact on your search engine rankings. Here's what he has to say:“Today, links are mainly achieved through developing original content that is in turn, shared across social media. Links to your content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube and other social networks help the search engines understand what websites are credible and should be ranked for what keyword phrases.”In a video that was released in 2014 Cutts says that Google treats and crawls social media sites just like any other website.“Facebook and Twitter pages are treated like any other pages in our web index, and so if something occurs on Twitter or occurs on Facebook and we’re able to crawl it then we can return that in our search results.”In conclusion, we think that links published on social media can be marked as credible backlinks which influence a page's rank, even though the authority of a social account doesn't.
- Without social media, this kind of high-value link building can be impossible.Another reason why social media is useful for SEO is that it encourages more external sites to link to your content.As far as Google is concerned, the more diverse your links are the better authority you gain.
Crossover content
While you create content for your brand on the web, think about how you can repurpose that content and share it across different platforms.If you're making a video for Youtube, you can take a snippet out of that video and repurpose it for various platforms. Add a call to action at the end which will drive the users back to the page where they can see the full video.Or, if you're making a live video on Facebook, you can download the video and post it on your Youtube channel.
Engagement
Social media is an efficient, expedient yet effective way of promoting your SEO based content.There is a huge impact on your bounce rate and duration of the on-site engagement by the number of links you have coming through.If your content is good and people do stick around to read it, these metrics communicate value to search engines.Social media is kind enough to allow you to promote your content through third-party outlets which are well known.Produce more content, get it shared highly, and chances are, your content will be found by influencers who will then share it further with the people who are following them.Only through social media and SEO promotion can you get such high-value networking and link building.
Increased Brand Awareness
It can be hard to measure your social media reach. You know that people see your social media posts, but do they really convert into new customers?How customers view your brand is important, and via social media, you can widen your reach.This might seem more like a branding advantage, but the SEO benefits are huge.If you increase your reputation on social media by consistently publishing high-quality content with increased engagement, it will lead to an increased online presence.As a ripple effect, this will lead to more online searches of your brand on Google over a period of time.You're likely to get ranked for non-branded keywords if your brand receives branded searches.When your ads are displayed on social media, people may not click directly. They might Google your brand and come to your website firsthand.
- Don’t “miss out”.Make sure you customize your content for each platform. Be it filming, editing, animating, or even things like adding different call to actions.For example, if you own a hair salon, you may have a full tutorial on your website and snippets on Facebook and Instagram etc. You can even add captions on Facebook posts since users there generally tend to watch videos without sounds.
Social search engines
Nowadays, people use social search engines to find what they're looking for, instead of just relying on Bing and Google.Several marketers strongly believe that social is the new SEO.
If you're active on Twitter or Facebook, it's possible that people will discover your company's new content distribution app after searching for content marketing related tweets or posts with Twitter's/Facebook's search engine.
So if you lend yourself to beautiful visual content, you can benefit from making your content visible on Pinterest and Instagram by using appropriate hashtags and categorizing your pins meaningfully.
As we mentioned above, if someone wants to check out your company, they're likely to open Twitter and Facebook and do a quick search to see what your presence is like on various channels.
Hence your company should expand your concept of SEO to include social search engines and not just traditional ones such as Google and Bing.