“Social is the way our work gets discovered. Content that is truly exceptional, unique, and useful can earn tremendous awareness through social media, and that social amplification often leads to great links which leads to great rankings.” –Rand Fishkin (CEO/Co-Founder, Moz)
Individuals often use social media on a regular basis without a care of its massive search engine optimization potential. You can ask just about any SEO company, and they would tell you the same thing: Social media marketing and SEO are two tightly interwoven strategies. Both techniques focus on creating an identity that would attract visitors. Similarly, SEO and social media marketing are both organic and inbound strategies. An effective social media marketing strategy requires compelling content and a highly visible strong brand presence. If you coupled this with your endeavors in SEO, you can significantly improve your social media reach and in the same manner, an excellent social media presence can affect your search rankings positively. However, not a lot of articles would discuss just how exactly social media can influence Google rankings. More often than not, search marketers would neglect to include the logistics of just how increased social media engagement can affect your search rankings, and would instead write it off as a broad generalization. As a result, social media marketers are often left scratching their heads wondering what techniques and strategies are truly effective.
To address this, this article has compiled some of the social media practices that are shown to have a positive impact on SEO—effectively boosting your search rankings as a result.
Building links with social channels
Back in the day, Google used to put a lot of emphasis on link building in their search rankings—regardless of whether the link you were building is of high quality or not. When people caught on, a lot of search marketers exploited this by peppering their websites with fake or low-quality links. As a result, Google shifted its focus to higher quality links. As social media websites already have a high web authority from the get-go, links found within the site are often considered higher-quality links. Because of Facebook’s overall high authority, the likelihood of your links ranking high and even surpassing your website is increased–regardless of how new or how old your Facebook page is. To maximize your link’s potential, do not limit the inclusion of links in your content only, but in every social profile you have.
Growing your number of followers
Similarly, as social media platforms overall have high quality, the number of followers and connections your profiles have would have a positive influence on your rankings. The more followers your Twitter page has, the better bonus you would get. Unfortunately, a lot of people have taken advantage of this by buying proxy Twitter followers. As a result, Google is a lot more meticulous when it comes to the quality of your followers and can detect if their proxies or not. A million proxy Twitter followers would not do much for your search rankings, build your following organically instead.
Optimizing your posts for searches
You need your pre-existing content for this strategy to work. Apart from the usual news articles, knowledge graph entries, it has been found that Google puts a higher emphasis on popular social media updates and places it at the top section of its SERP. Make sure you can attain that position by having your posts optimized for that opportunity. Utilize a video, an infographic or a link to a compelling article as an anchor for your post. Let this be your foundation, so give it a title that is not only accurate but descriptive as well. As you post it, structure your foundation with text that is optimized for a particular type of search.
Make your content searchable and shareable
This one should be a no-brainer as if you want more engagement and higher search rankings, people should be able to find your content as well as share it. Some social accounts would give the user of keeping some content private or public only to a certain extent. Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and even Pinterest all have this privacy feature mainly to protect the user. While this might be great for users who are using these platforms on a personal capacity, the same cannot be said for businesses. Business accounts should have all their social accounts public and have the content searchable so that people would be able to see your posts and share it. Having your content shared is a great way to boost rankings.
Locally-Optimized Posts
Social media is an excellent avenue for local community engagement by sending local-specific authority signals to major search engines. One of the ways to do this is to make updates on your page whenever your company becomes involved in a local event as well as interacting with other local establishments and brands on social media. Anytime your company attends a local event, take a lot of photos and videos and make a post about it. The more local residents comment, the more your participation is reinforced ensuing to a higher visibility in local searches.
