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How Can Social Media Help Your SEO?
By StackServe
If you own a website, you probably want it to show up on the first page of Google or other search engines. But how do you get there? One of the factors that can help you is SEO – search engine optimization.
SEO is the process of making your website more relevant, user-friendly and trustworthy for search engines and users. However, to achieve that, SEO may not be the only thing that matters.
Social media on its own can help you connect with your audience, share your content, and build your brand reputation. But the question is, how do you utilize that to your advantage in terms of your SEO efforts? And what are the best practices to make the most of it?
In this blog post, we will answer these questions and show you how social media can supercharge your SEO.
Understanding Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization is basically a few techniques and strategies to enhance a website’s visibility and ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). It works by optimizing various aspects of a website, such as performance, content, keywords, meta tags, and backlinks, to convince search engines, such as Google and Bing, that the website is high-quality and contains information searchers need.
SEO aims to attract more organic traffic from search engines, improving a website’s visibility. The ultimate goal is to improve the website’s chances of being found by users searching for relevant information or products online.
A few proven techniques used to achieve good SEO include the following:
Keyword Research
This technique involves identifying relevant keywords and phrases that your target audience will likely use when searching for your products or services. Proper keyword research covers relevant topics in a particular niche or industry to convince search engines that you have enough authority to provide answers to searchers’ queries.
High-Quality Content
High-quality content uses keywords to provide information that satisfies searchers’ intents and answers their questions. It is usually valuable, engaging, and comprehensible, using text, images, and sometimes videos to solve searchers’ problems.
You can only achieve this with good keyword research to solve search engine users’ problems. The more relevance, dependability, and structure a web content has in relation to the keyword it is crafted around, the more quality it is, and the higher its chances of ranking high on search engines.
On-Page Optimization
Having written good content, it is important to optimize it.
On-page optimization includes adding relevant keywords to meta titles, meta descriptions, headings, and URL structures to make it easier for search engines to understand the content. It also includes linking to any existing and relevant content you may have already published.
If you want to maximize the chances of your content being discovered, on-page optimization is crucial.
Mobile-Friendly Design
A mobile-friendly website makes it easy for searchers to navigate and peruse its content on a mobile device. Since many search engine users use their smartphones, it is essential to consider their ease of accessing information on your site.
Ensure your text is sized to make it easily read on mobile devices. Also, use mobile-friendly themes on your site.
Page Speed
A site that takes a 10 seconds to load will experience a higher bounce rate compared to its competitor with a page speed of under 3 seconds. Many sites now load in milliseconds, and that helps searchers access the information in their content faster, providing a better initial user experience.
Search engines obviously prefer fast-loading websites. You can optimize your loading speeds by using image compression and lazy loading, removing unused CSS, delaying Javascript execution and caching your pages.
Link Building
Arguably the most important factor for ranking a website favorably on SERPs, link building involves other websites referring to certain pages on your site as the source of their information. It shows search engines that other websites trust the information you’re putting out there, so it also begins to trust your content.
However, not all links are the same. Getting a few links from websites with higher authority is better than getting hundreds from spammy websites. Therefore, focus on obtaining high-quality backlinks from authoritative and relevant websites to improve your site’s credibility.
User Experience
Search engines are particular about satisfying their users’ needs and the ease with which they meet them. Therefore, creating a great overall experience for your website’s visitors is one way to ensure search engines favor your site.
Enhance user experience on your website by increasing performance, making it easy to navigate, ensuring clear calls to action, and providing high-quality content.
Can Social Media Help Your SEO?
Now that you understand SEO and how it works, let’s get down to the important question, can social media help your SEO?
Yes, social media can help your SEO, but not in the same way as those SEO techniques do.
Social media helps you to build brand authority. Your audience on every social media platform gets to know your name and what you offer to the extent that they trust the information you provide.
Your authority on social media can translate to improved authority on the search engine result pages, especially if your audience attaches your brand name to a keyword.
Search engines quickly recognize that a keyword is attached to a niche or industry. When your audience attaches that keyword to your brand name, they’re telling the search engine that they only want the information you provide on that keyword. Search engines take that to mean those searchers trust your content more than your competitors in that niche.
Social media is also a good source of traffic and authority building, and since that’s the ultimate goal for SEO, it indirectly improves your SEO. But how?
Ways Social Media Can Help Your SEO
Certain aspects of your site’s SEO will see improvement due to the influence of social media in the following ways:
Increased Website Traffic
The competition to get traffic on search engine results pages is stiff. However, you can get traffic to your site’s content by sharing it on social media platforms. You can access many Facebook groups, create dedicated pages that share your content, and have friends do the same for you.
Sharing your content on social media platforms can attract more visitors to your website. The more people click on your links and visit your site, the more it signals to search engines about the relevance and popularity of your content, potentially leading to improved rankings.
Social Signals
Social media interactions such as likes, shares, comments, and retweets act as social signals. While they may not directly impact your SEO, they improve your brand’s visibility and may influence how well you rank on search engine result pages, as long as you satisfy other techniques.
The extent to which social signals influence a site’s general ranking is under debate. However, it’s common for search engines to present relevant search results that include a brand’s social media channels for certain keywords.
Brand Awareness and Exposure
One of the advantages of ranking high on search engine results pages is that many users recognize your brand as the go-to site for information about specific niches. Brands such as Investopedia are known for their financial and investment content on search engines. However, you can achieve brand awareness through social media as well.
Social media provides an excellent platform to increase your brand’s visibility and reach a broader audience. As more people become aware of your brand through social channels, they might search for it on search engines, thus increasing branded search volume—an indicator of brand authority.
Link Building Opportunities
Quality content attracts links naturally. Sharing your site’s content on social media gets it in front of people who may not see it in search results. If your content is relevant, answers their questions, or solves their problems, they may reference it in their posts, giving you a backlink.
High-quality backlinks are essential for SEO, and social media can help facilitate link-building.
Local SEO Benefits
For businesses with a physical location, maintaining an active presence on social media can positively impact local SEO. Encouraging customer reviews and interactions on social platforms can contribute to local search rankings.
Faster Indexing
Indexing new site content takes longer nowadays, but trusted sites get their new content indexed faster. One way to address this issue and help your site get noticed faster by search engine crawlers is to share your new content on social media.
Search engines often discover new content through social media. When you share a new blog post or page on social platforms, search engine crawlers may find and index it faster.
Social Media Profiles in Search Results
Social media profiles for your brand can also appear in search engine results. When people search for your brand, having active and well-optimized social media profiles can help occupy valuable space on the search results page.
Long-Tail Keyword Insights
Social media can provide insights into trending topics, discussions, and the language used by your target audience. Keying into these long-tail keywords can help to boost your search engine rankings in a short time.
However, you must understand these keywords, their usage, and how they can help you create content that aligns better with the phrases people are searching for.
Engagement and User Experience
A strong social media presence can lead to higher engagement rates, longer time spent on your website, and lower bounce rates—all positive signals for search engines.
The more time people spend on your site, the more search engines believe your content is engaging and relevant. Also, when they leave a comment related to the content, search engines take this as a sign that your content is helpful and promotes it on its pages to other searchers of the same keyword.
Conclusion
SEO determines how well your site ranks in search engine result pages and how much organic traffic your site gets. However, social media influences your SEO by driving traffic to your site without considering the competition in the SERPs. It also opens your brand up for increased awareness. Your site can improve its authority and relevance through the engagement and backlinks it generates through social media.
