Is social media important for SEO?

Is social media important for SEO? You bet.

Firstly, social media allows you to create great quality content, share it and watch others interact and share it too, which spreads your online message quickly. It is called social media for a reason … get social! Communicate with your followers and get them engaged. When they feel valued by your brand it results in repeated organic sharing.

As you work on your social media profiles, you will develop a following of users that can, and will, share your content. Each bit of new content that hits your site ought to be shared quickly on your social media profiles. This can generate social connections, sharing the content creates natural links – something Google likes.

Whilst it can be difficult, set aside some time every day to build up your social interactions. This keeps your social profiles dynamic and drives genuine activity to your site that is high calibre traffic. These visitors can transform into clients or become additions to your network.

Social media can help to raise your brand profile to a wider audience. When that happens, you increase the overall awareness of your brand, which can lead to more people searching for your products or services as a result – not a bad thing at all!

Social sharing is the new link building

When Google sees that more people are searching for a brand, they view that brand as more credible and well known and thus reward it with a higher ranking.

Despite this, Google doesn’t value social media interactions so your likes/follows/shares etc. are not for the purpose of ranking. However, both Google and Bing have recently combined Twitter and Facebook into their algorithms to incorporate social status updates into search results. Look for that to be applied soon – and make sure you get a head start.

Likewise, Google uses Twitter as a source to discover new content. As we all know, Google gathers pages during its crawling process and creates an index to make it easier to find content. This can be quite time consuming and tedious for Google with the sheer amount of new content being produced every day. Twitter makes this whole process a lot easier and quicker for Google as tweets can generate a lot of traction in a short amount of time.

Factors such as how many retweets, how many people tweeted the content and the time frame of when the content was shared are all taken into consideration when indexing.

While social shares may or may not affect a webpage’s position in search listings directly, your social profiles unquestionably influence the content of search results. In fact, social media profiles are often amongst the top results in search listings for brand names.

For example, when I searched Cyberfrog Design in Google, our Twitter profile appeared second, with LinkedIn and Facebook appearing third and fourth respectively. This is before I’ve even mentioned Google displaying the company’s Google+ profile information in the right-hand sidebar at the very top of the search results page, as seen below. This goes without saying, but Google obviously favours its very own Google+ platform so make sure you take time to work on your company’s Google+ page every day. This can either be adding content to your own profile or contributing to Google+ communities, just make sure its relevant and worthy of positioning high on Google.

In conclusion, is social media important for SEO? Social media is definitely a part of SEO and the two should not be treated as separate things. Both are a search engine ranking factor, as SEO is used to increase ranking of your website using keywords in search engine whereas social media directs traffic and increases popularity of website.

Online marketing is evolving and the more areas you can cover, the better results you’ll see in each. You need to get social to achieve online success.

If you would like any help or guidance give us a call on 0151 709 4930 or find more details of our social media and digital marketing services.