Digital marketing is a field that deals with pretty much every online effort you make to expand your business. The Almighty search engine optimization is one of those efforts, so is social media.
Social media and SEO have a symbiotic relationship. This works out well, seeing as they’re two of the most important things you can do to find success online. We’ll do a little explanation of how social media and SEO work together and what you should do to capitalize on the fact that they do.
Social Media and SEO
To understand how these two subjects work together to help one another, it’s important to get a little bit about how search engines work.
Google’s algorithm uses search factors that come together to let Google know how relevant a page is in relation to the keywords in a user search. Their goal is to make search engine results as relevant to user searches as possible.
The more you can optimize a page for search engines, the more traffic you will see because your site will rank at the top. People are wired to click one of the first few results on a results page, so getting to the top is of utmost importance.
There’s a lot of information contained with search engine optimization and social media. If you’re curious to know a few more specifics about social media and marketing, read more here.
Social Signals as Ranking Factors
Social signals here will refer to your pages and links that are presented to Google via your social media pages.
At one time, social signals were considered in the ranking factors of search engine algorithms. They are, however, not considered anymore.
While we don’t know exactly why they were taken out of the equation, it’s likely because so many links present on social media don’t really mean that much. Followers and subscribers are very important, but it’s also easier to fake thousands of followers now than it ever has been in the past.
In other words, some of the cold hard data present on social media platforms are hard to give an objective value. That said, social media still plays heavily into how well your organic SEO does.
That said, when they took social media out of the SEO ranking factors it was a pretty big hit to the professionals. That’s because things like Facebook likes and shares once played a huge part in how well a page ranked.
Why You Shouldn’t Rule Social Media Out
The objective of search engine optimization isn’t just to rank high in the results, it’s to get people to visit your website.
Optimizing for Google searches is definitely an excellent way to reach people when they’re interested in your product or service, but social media is a way to get people acquainted with your brand.
If you can cultivate a good number of followers on your social media sites and post regularly enough for those followers to become familiar with you, you’ll be the first brand that pops up in their heads when they need your product or service.
Beyond that, having links to your homepages and product pages is exactly the same as having them pop up on search engine results pages. You just have direct access to the users where they spend their time, and the link on your social media page is just as valuable as the one at the top of the Google results pages.
Use Social Media as an Arm of SEO
Keyword research, backlinking, and content creation are all huge elements of a traditional SEO platform. In order to rank for specific, popular keywords, you have to know which keywords are popular and create content that fits in well with them.
There’s a lot of information contained with search engine optimization and social media. If you’re curious to know a few more specifics about social media and marketing, read more here.
Content creation has to happen if you want to stay relevant, keep freshness, and continue generating traffic that moves down the pipeline toward your product pages to make conversions.
The hope is that if you gather the right elements, your content creation efforts will rank and be found by users in the search engine results pages. Social media can easily be used as a way to push your content out to your followers so they have immediate access to it.
Those followers are probably going to have a greater affinity toward your product than they would if they had stumbled upon your page in the search results, meaning you might get a purchase from them.
Your Content Can Spread
One thing that social media offers your SEO is the ability for it to get shared. If you consider social shares as opportunities similar to ranking well in search results, every time you get your content shared is a blessing.
That share will go onto the feeds of countless people who will potentially share it, opening it up to countless other people to do the same. Just because something only has, say, five shares, doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been seen by hundreds of people.
That’s the beauty of boosting your social media presence. You have the opportunity to get people acquainted with your brand and present your content and product information directly to those people.
Further, those people can then spread your brand and product out to the rest of the world.
Social Media Moves Back to Traditional SEO
Finally, your social media efforts will come full circle when you have enough of a following.
Page views and backlinks will skyrocket when your content is pushed through your social media. As people start to look at the content you’re creating and follow links back to product pages, those people will start to suggest your brand in their own content.
If they like you, they might pop a link to your site in their blog post. That will happen more and more, eventually boosting your pages to the top of search results pages.
Need Strategy?
Social media and SEO work together and are incredibly important individually. It’s essential that you think through your digital marketing platforms and set yourself up to have visibility online.
Visit our site to learn more about how you can start seeing the results you’re looking for!