The impact of social media on search engine rankings has always been debatable. There is no clear evidence as of today because Google’s Matt Cutts once said in 2010 that they were counting on social media engagement like Facebook and Twitter links when considering ranking websites, and four years later, he released a video saying Twitter Follows and Facebook Likes were not considered as search ranking signals.
According to him, social media would send incomplete signals and would not provide comprehensive picture due to its nature of updating constantly. Google would rather count on the exact information its crawler would find on a web page at the time of crawling than the varying data found from social channels.
This is logically true and all or at least most of the studies and claims made after that kind of supported the idea of discarding social signals as search engine ranking factors. One of the recent studies made by SEMRush last year discovered that social media signals including the likes, shares and follows have no impact on the search engine rankings.
So, it’s now evident that social media networks do not have any real impact on SEO.
However, in practice, social media sites and their signals do impact your SEO performance. You simply cannot deny the power of good online social media reputation that can actually translate to a gain in customers’ trust, which results in growth in the conversions. More conversions help the brand grow, and search engines notice all of that. A good, trustworthy brand that has a great audience and customer-base can easily rank on search engines. There is no doubt about that, and that is the indirect impact of social media on the SEO result. And for most digital marketing professionals, it is the direct positive impact of social media on SEO, and rightly so.
The content that is liked, followed and shared on social media more is more relevant for the audience, and search engines want to rank those relevant pieces of content, so the impact of social media on SEO is quite evident.
In this post, we are going to cover 6 of the important ways your social media signals can boost your SEO performance and search engine rankings.
Content promotion
Social media networks serve as a great platform to promote your content. To me, social media is probably the best place to promote and market your content really fast. If your content has some value, then there is no better place than social media or quicker way than sharing it with your social media friends and audience.
Whether it’s a piece of writing, an infographic post or a video element, your content can go viral and become an overnight sensation on social media. All you need to do is target the right audience and create the right kind of post for them. Understand their needs and emotions and that can give you a great idea of creating your content.
When you’re going to promote your content on social media, don’t just act like you’re here to promote your piece. People will notice that really quickly and it won’t take them long to start disliking your tactic and in turn your brand. So, instead of a purely promotional approach, you need to earn their trust and share your content so as to make them believe that you’re here to offer help. Once you’ve earned their trust everything will fall into place.
Thus, social media is the best place to promote your content and create various types of link opportunities. With your content getting popular with more audience likes, shares and engagement your chances of creating search engine friendly links also increases. That will positively impact your SEO score since search engines, while ranking websites, primarily count on how many links your website receives from people and other websites organically.
Brand popularity
Like we discussed in the previous point, social media is probably the best platform to share and promote your content. As your content gets more audience engagement, popularity and traction people start talking about your brand more. With that, your brand can earn trust from your audience and become popular really fast.
Search engines do count on the human interactions with the brand and the brand’s response to its audience when estimating the brand’s reliability. Reliability is directly proportional to search engine ranking. Google, in particular, has an entire document about this, which is known as Search Quality Raters Guideline Document.
Companies that are very active on social media and directly interact with their potential and existing customers by responding to all of their queries are loved by their customers, which boosts their customer satisfaction level. When people start talking about your brand, search engines notice that. When the brand mentions are positive, it impacts your search engine ranking positively and your brand website is ranked on the search results.
This is how a strong social media presence boosts your brand popularity, which further results in direct gain in search engine ranking. Thus, social media do have a great influence on the SEO performance of all brands.
Beneficial partnerships
Social media marketing for a business brand is all about building an audience, interacting with them and solving their problems. Many businesses that depend on inexperienced social media managers or freelancers that claim to manage the social media marketing part are not able to achieve their social media goals or scale their business.
The only reason could be that their social media managers with lack of experience only think social media marketing or management is all about creating post materials and posting them on the social media pages. They simply count on the number of posts they create and post the social media handles for the client.
That is seriously wrong.
Social media management is much more than just doing regular posting. Professional social media management includes regular posting, enhancing engagement of those posts or tweets, interacting with the audience, being active all the time to respond to people who ask questions and look for relevant answers, increasing the page rating, solving people’s problems and much more.
One big responsibility of your social media manager comes in the form of building beneficial partnerships with other organic influencers and non competitive brands in your niche. Most will ignore your requests, but there will be a few that will accept your partnership proposal and would agree to create valuable content along with you for your audience and theirs as well.
There is nothing wrong with that. In fact, building good partnerships with other small brands and organic influencers through your social media channels can actually find a way for mutual growth. Your beneficial partnerships can open many scopes for you that you can use to expand your reach. Reach expansion means your content would be liked, followed and shared by more people on social media, which results in improved SEO ranking.
Content authority
Content authority is a great ranking factor. If your content is at the top of the ladder and is simply the best in the niche, search engines are going to sing your praises and reward you to top search engine spot. Your content provides the greatest answer and the best information to the audience that need it, so your content has the authority.
But how does this authority come to your content? How does this whole thing happen?
It starts with creating detailed, in-depth mega post for the audience that answers the question completely. The purpose is that once a reader comes to read the post, s/he will leave with the highest degree of satisfaction and won’t need to read any other post ever after for that particular topic.
Gradually, that exhaustive mega post with little updates and addition can become the top-of-the-ladder post in the niche. And that’s when your content gains the authority. With that your website gets some authority too.  So, it’s a gradual process.
So, how do social media come to play?
Let me explain. You know that your content has the complete answer or information for its target readers. But how will the target readers discover your content or your website? You have to reach out to them. There you need the power of social media. Reach out to your intended audience before they take time to come and discover your masterpiece content. Make the entire process fast and smooth with the help of social media marketing.
So, you now understand how social media is responsible for your content authority that can further lead to search engine ranking, right?
Content lifespan
Social shares can give your content a longer life span. The popular social media platforms are built in a way such that they always try to expand the visibility and audience of the popular content. So, with the help of the social media algorithm, your content reaches out to more people as it establishes some authority and gains more popularity.
So, after putting all the hard work creating a masterpiece, the next immediate step is to start outbound promotion of the content through your social channels. Unless it reaches its target audience initially nobody discovers the value of your content, and it gets lost in the ocean of online content.
However, with more people consuming your content and sharing it on the social media, your content gets the initial boost it deserves. As it gets more engagement, it stays there for long and the lifespan of your content increases. With that, your content becomes a strong contender for the top spot positioning on the search results page.
So, this is how social media promotion increases the lifespan of your content and provides a boost to your SEO score.
Conversions
Social media promotion can definitely increase the conversions or sales. If you are running an eCommerce store and are offering regular deals for your audience. They will get to know about the offers right from your social channels. Your content will do it all.
More conversions mean more brand reputation and more popularity. A popular brand name has always a higher chance of dominating the search results, so that’s how effective social media marketing can increase the conversion rate and boost your search engine ranking (SEO performance).
If you are looking for the best conversion rate optimization through excellent social media marketing, you may hire our qualified social media marketing experts. We would offer you the highest quality service at the best rate. We grow when our clients grow!