“It’s Complicated”
Social Media and SEO are often seen as two separate components of digital marketing, and you might be wondering, which is more important? Which one should you spend more time planning?
Well, SEO and the content you share are major fundamentals of digital marketing, but then Social Media is something that you can’t ignore, especially in this day and age. Even though social media doesn’t have a direct impact in helping your SERP, it does help increase brand awareness, brand perception and customer relationships!
So to answer your question, (in short): they are both important. But as you can see, it can be quite confusing to know which to prioritise as they are both separate marketing tools...
This post should help you better understand the relationship between social media and SEO, and why they go hand-in-hand.
How Does Social Media and Search Engines Work?
Search Engine Ranking Page
Before we get started, it’s important to clarify how social media specifically impacts your SERP:
Search Engines like Google are designed with search algorithms, so when users search a query the most relevant page will appear at the top of the results page. Try it out yourself; when you search your company's name in Google what’s the first result? It should be your website’s homepage.
The next pages might be other pages from your website or articles that you have been mentioned in. The next couple of results should then be your social media pages like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter etc.
As you can see, when searching for “flint studios” on Google, our website is the first result, but as you scroll down, our social media pages are further down the results page.
This is because Google doesn’t directly factor in how well your social media platform is performing when collecting data about pages. What Google does instead is they ‘crawl’ your social media platforms for information, just like it would do with any other page. So, if you do have a large number of users visiting your social media platforms that include those all-important keywords, then they will rank on search engines.
How Social Media Affects SEO
Discovery, Traffic and Backlinks
As we mentioned, social media pages don’t help with ranking your website, because Google looks for backlinks and page content; however, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn't have a social media page.
Statista has estimated that over 2.5 billion people are using social media, so why wouldn’t you have a platform for these people to discover, browse, interact and engage with? It’s a digital place for your target audience to find you and ask you questions or share their thoughts on your brand.
If you keep up-to-date with your social media and share good content about your company, not only does it increase brand image but it also builds a loyal community and can lead to an increase in organic traffic and backlinks.
As a result of people discovering your social media pages, it will lead them to discover your website: which will, in turn, increase your authority on search engines and therefore will increase your position on SERP.
How do you Implement a Social Media Strategy?
The key to having a strong relationship between social media and SEO is understanding that they are both trying to achieve the same thing: discovery and answers.
People use social media and search engines to find out about companies, to help them find the product/ service they are after, or to even help them with a problem that they are currently going through.
Keywords
Keywords are the backbone to an SEO strategy; finding relevant high-volume phrases and queries and implementing them to your content on your website is one of the most important things you can do to gain visibility and improve your SERP.
As we have already discussed, search engines and social media are used to answer the publics questions, meaning, all the hard work that you have put into finding out the keywords for your industry to better understand the audience you are targetting, can also be used in your social media content.
However, it’s important that you don’t stuff your posts with keywords, only use them where they are appropriate and read naturally. The use of hashtags is also a great way to get people talking and engaging with each other about your business, while also generating brand awareness.
Add Links to your Social Profiles
When you are posting content on social media on Facebook or Twitter and you provide a link, they are normally a no-follow link and therefore don’t have an impact on your SEO. However, the URL’s that you provide in your bio on your accounts are a follow link: so ensure your website is linked in your bios!
Social Media Sharing Buttons
Social media buttons are vital. Not only has Google stated that they are going to start using social media sharing data to also help determine search rankings, but they allow and encourage readers to share your content further.
By visitors sharing your content on social media, it will not only increase traffic to your page but it will also help and improve your SERP position.
Optimise Social Media Profiles
You need to think of your social media profiles as add ons to your website; you need to optimise these as well!
Make sure that you have catchy titles, informative descriptions and keywords. Use the same SEO strategy from your website to your social media pages.
Engage and Establish New Relationships
Relationships are a vital part of marketing for a business to build trust, loyalty and repeat sales. Social media is a great platform to build relationships and provide new opportunities for link-building, brand awareness, brand communities and more.
If you would like to find out more about the complicated relationship between social media and SEO, then you should contact us, Flint Studios on,
019 2540 7070 or email [email protected]