While social media accounts aren’t a direct factor towards good SEO, it would be ignorant to say that they don’t have any influence on your SEO rankings.
As of July, over half of the world population now uses social media or has an account on a social media platform. In this article, we will discuss what we believe are the most important things to remember when discussing the relationship between social media and SEO.
But before we dive in, let’s provide some more background information on the building relationship between social and SEO.
The History
Back when social media was still in its early stages of development, search engines around the world didn’t rank social accounts and pages on results pages. This is because the idea of purely social run businesses hadn’t been brought forwards.
Now, you can talk to business entrepreneurs and marketing experts anywhere in the world and they will all tell you how important social media presence is. Social media accounts with a huge following can help to tell Google algorithms that this company holds a lot more authority over the rest.
Let’s identify what happened in the last decade to put social media & SEO marketing where it is today. We’ll also look into some factors to consider in your own marketing campaigns.
Social page links can boost your search ranking
A big question on a lot of marketing teams minds right now is this: does Google class links leading to published content on social accounts as credible backlinks? When you link to your weekly blog posts on your Facebook page, does this have any impact on how well your post will rank on search engine results pages?
Sadly, Google has been very absent in releasing a defined answer to this question. But that’s not to say that there aren’t other people out there putting in the research.
Optinmonster found in 2019 that having a highly popular social post that links to a page on your website does in fact influence website SEO. This leads marketing companies to believe that Google algorithms don’t look at the authority of social media accounts, but rather the popularity of their posts.
Social Media Profiles Will Rank on Google
While social media shares may affect a web page’s position in search rankings, your social profile will absolutely influence the content of your search results. In most cases, social media profiles are found to be amongst the top results in search listings for brand names.
When I searched for our client Easy2Pay, for example, the results showed their Facebook page to be in the top 5 under their brand name. Of course, our current SEO work meant that the rest of the results were links to their website.
Links to social channels can feel much more personal to audiences than ones leading to webpages. Whenever I begin researching a new company, I typically go straight to their Twitter or Facebook page. So, I will do the same for most other accounts which have their social media profile on Google results.
Social Media Platforms are Search Engines Too
Most people don’t just use Google and Bing to look stuff up; they also use social media platforms to search for what they need to find information on.
This works in a couple of ways. If you’re active on Twitter, it’s possible that people will discover your latest content after searching for related tweets with Twitter’s search engine. Likewise, brands that provide people with beautiful visual content can benefit too. Usually by making their quality content visible in Pinterest and Instagram, using hashtags and properly categorising their pins.
If a possible client wants to research your company, they’re more than likely going to open Twitter and Facebook and do a quick search to see what kind of presence you have on each channel. They might also use these search engines to determine how you stand with your tone of voice and determine your personality.
In Conclusion
Google has gone back and forth about using social media. However, the claim that Google’s search algorithm ignores social signals should never be taken as the last word on this subject.
Instead, social media and SEO marketers alike should broaden their concept of search and SEO. Remember to always consider the multitude of ways that people can find content on the web. You should also think about the positive results that increased traffic from social platforms can potentially have on your search rankings.
The fact of the matter is this: the web is all about building relationships. Always try acquiring new audiences, express your identity and share new ideas with the world. It’s inherently social, and there’s no reason that SEO best practices would go against the grain. Especially since the rules that govern SEO are ultimately meant to make the web a more enjoyable and useful place.
Are you looking to supplement your digital marketing efforts with an effective SEO Marketing Team? Get in touch with us today at Be My Social to see how we can help!
