Does social media impact your SEO rankings? Not exactly—there’s no guarantee or concrete proof that social media is something that search engines value. However, social media does provide benefits that indirectly impact your SEO.
Let’s take a look at how social media impacts search engine optimization and how you can optimize your social media to be SEO-friendly.
How does social media impact SEO?
Social media affects your SEO by amplifying reach.
The links you share across social platforms increase brand exposure. When more people share your content throughout social media, it generates social signals that indicate your posts are useful to your target market.
Moss Clement
Current search engine algorithms take into account one thing above all others: how helpful your content is. In other words, they like web pages that their users linger on, interact with, and return to.
When your social media posts are shared by your audience to their audiences, search engines are more likely to register your pages and content as helpful—and, therefore, worthy of producing in a search result.
Put simply? The more active you are on social media, the better your chances of reaching new audiences, helping more users, getting more website traffic, and being seen as an authority in your field—by search engines and consumers alike.
How do I make my social media SEO-friendly?
So what exactly do you need to do to optimize your social media for SEO? Here are some tips to help you get started.
Make Great Content
There’s no way around it: if your social content isn’t fantastic, you’re not going to get the engagement you need to boost your brand’s SEO performance.
When your content gets shared, a few things happen:
- You get an instant backlink
- Your reach increases
- You make more impressions
Not only does quality social media content get shared to more people, but it also has the potential to send new prospects to your website—and the more legitimate traffic your website gets, the more impressed search engines will be.
Use Strategic Keywords
While content is (currently) king, keywords are still an important part of any SEO strategy. Predictably, this includes social media.
Beyond your posts, captions, and hashtags, make sure your profiles are nice and descriptive—that is, make sure they use the keywords that you believe your audience would search for when they need your services.
Keyword stuffing is NOT the way to go here. Instead, focus on being helpful to consumers. That’s the #1 way search engines will reward you!
Don’t forget to make sure that your location and contact info is correct and the same across all your profiles (social and otherwise). Consistency is key when it comes to search engine web crawlers—the less confused they are about who you are, where you are, and what you do, the better you’ll perform.
Build Relationships
Link-building and cultivating backlinks is essential to any SEO strategy. So how can you implement these tactics on social media?
It’s simple: just get social!
Building an engaged community means that you’re more likely to score clicks and attract meaningful traffic to your site. Those same folks can also give your content a much-needed boost when prompted.
Brent Barnhart
There’s no benefit to your brand if you’re just shouting into the void. So do what social media was made for and start making conversation! By creating relationships with your customers, your prospects, and even other brands, you increase the likelihood of gaining shares.
Social media shares are a form of backlink: they signal to users that you, the source, are an authority in your field. Again, while social metrics aren’t a direct ranking factor in most search engines (Google says a hard no, but in the past Bing has seemed open to it!), this is a way to influence the metrics that they do pay attention to.
Stay Active
It’s no secret that an inactive social media page isn’t worth much of anything—to your brand or your audience. But not staying active on social media can hurt more than just your Facebook likes.
Search bots are well aware of how ‘dead’ groups and pages in social networks differ from live and active ones. A high-quality account or group not only pleases subscribers with regular posts but is also an important source of traffic due to clicks on published links.
Alex Kudimov
This doesn’t mean you should post incessantly! Instead, schedule great content to post regularly. This will ease your workload and give your followers a steady stream of content to interact with.
Give Your Social Media an SEO-Friendly Makeover
By putting these tips to work, you can empower your social media pages to become natural SEO-boosters.
Need help? Contact Kirkpatrick Creative today. We have the know-how you need to get your business up in the search engine rankings.