SEO and social media have, until recently, been considered two distinct tactics. SEO helps firms be found, and social media helps firms connect with their audiences.
As social media platforms have evolved, users (especially Gen Z) have begun to interact with them as if they were traditional search engines. Search queries are not limited to Yelp-ish questions like “What’s the best restaurant in Boston?” Anything that might have been researched by entering terms into Google can now be searched on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and even Pinterest.
What this means for businesses is that social media channels need to be thought of as both a place to engage with customers and a place where people come to find out all kinds of information about your brands, products, and services.
What’s more, the way that social media and SEO each inform the other has evolved. This creates new opportunities for savvy firms.
What “Social Media Does Not Directly Impact SEO” Means
“Social media doesn’t directly impact SEO” originated in 2015 with an answer Google’s John Mueller gave to the question of whether social signals have any impact on the organic rankings in Google:
This answer led to a school of thought that there is no relationship between the two tactics, which isn’t true.
What the statement means is that there is no straight line between whether and how you use social media and whether and how you rank for search terms. For example, reaching your 5,000th follower on LinkedIn does not, in and of itself, make you rank higher for anything on Google. Similarly, someone disliking your YouTube video doesn’t immediately trigger a drop in your search engine rankings.
That’s the clear-cut part. In between is a lot of gray. Social media and search engines do have a relationship, but it’s more nuanced than “if this, then that.”
Social Media SEO: Making Use of the In-Between
The relationship between social media and SEO has evolved into a new area of practice that lives in that gray area. Social media is an emerging field that uses certain aspects of social media to help improve search engine optimization. Below, we highlight some of the key principles of social media SEO.
Social Media Is a Search Result
As far as search engines like Google are concerned, there is no difference between content that is found on a web page and content that is found on a social media account. You can see this in action by searching for yourself. If you have any social media accounts, they will appear toward the top of the list. This is because those social media platforms are specifically engineered to outrank traditional web pages.
This means that your social media profiles are just as important as your web pages for purposes of SEO. They don’t “directly impact” your SEO, but what is on those pages will impact when they’ll be displayed for certain search terms. In turn, how they look in search results will impact whether people click through to them. It’s important to optimize your social media profiles just as you would your website pages.
SEO Helps Grow Awareness of – and Engagement In – Your Social Channels
If someone who didn’t know you existed finds your social media profile in their search results, they’re now aware of your firm. If they click through to your social media profile, they will likely start engaging with content. This is because they started their journey to your social media profile by looking for something related to what you do. They are more likely to read, like, share, and comment on your posts than someone who saw your social profile in another way.
Why does it matter if people are coming to your social media profiles? Because…
Social Media Helps Increase Organic Website Traffic
If a person who discovered your social media account is interested in what you do, they will click through to your website. This is a form of organic (not through paid advertising) web traffic. Generally, people who come to a website organically stay on the site longer, look at more content, and are more likely to take the next step toward a deal. Social media helps attract more of those people to your website.
Additionally, if your website isn’t currently optimized, social media can help your firm have a presence in search rankings while you work to improve your SEO.
Social Media Gives You Ideas for Content That Will Resonate with Your Audiences
Stuck on what content would be attractive to your prospective clients? Look on social media. What problems are people talking about? What questions are they asking? Using social media to identify content topics is more effective than asking your internal team – because your internal team are not your customers.
Social Media Can Help You Identify the Keywords You Should Target
The most effective keywords to target are the words and phrases your prospects actually use when talking about their problems. Ranking for your product’s technical name or an insider term only helps earn new business if those are the same terms people would use when searching. Listening to your clients and prospects on social media can help you understand what keywords you need to rank for to be discoverable to them.
Social Media Can Help Google Understand When You Have Posted New Content
Adding new content to your website helps your search engine rankings once search engines have crawled that content. There are too many websites in the world for search engines to crawl websites every day to see if something new has been posted, so they rely on signals that new content has been posted. One of the most important signals is increased traffic to the website. When search engines like Google see that more people than usual are going to your site, that’s a sign that there is probably new content that they need to crawl. This content then gets indexed and eligible to be a search engine result.
As new content is added to your website, sharing it on social media can help it get indexed faster.
Social Media Helps Attract Backlinks
Backlinks are the links that other websites have to your site. The better the site that’s linking to you, the more search engines see your site as a valuable resource that should be more visible to people. Conversely, backlinks from spam farms and “bad actor” websites can harm your SEO.
Social media helps your site attract helpful backlinks. When your business and your content are shown to more people, there is a larger pool of potential good backlinks.
Quick Ways to Improve Your Discoverability Through Social Media
There’s no magic “easy button” for making your firm more discoverable, but tackling these items is a good start:
- Make sure your social media profiles are complete. Most platforms will show you how complete they consider your profile to be, so get this as close to 100% as possible.
- Claim your Google My Business profile and complete it. This is a free tool that will really help boost your discoverability.
- Use a third-party tool like link in bio tool like LinkTree or Bio to link to multiple web pages or other sites from your social media platforms.
- Consider adding social sharing buttons on key website content pages, but make sure they are configured correctly. If they create a poor user experience or take people away from your site without exploring it, this tool might not be worth it.
- Create a publishing calendar that makes it possible for you to publish content consistently, both on your website and on your social media channels. This helps search engines and humans know when to look for updates.
- Social posts should send people back to your website as often as possible. This helps move your prospects into territory you own, giving you more data about what resonates with them – and they get a deeper picture of what your firm offers.
Social Media SEO Takeaways
Social media has transformed to be about more than dance videos and vacation updates. It can be a valuable tool that helps further your discoverability by supporting your SEO. If you understand how each social platform works and how to best optimize for each, you will start to compounded returns in your discoverability.
