How Social Media Helps SEO and Building Your Brand

How Social Media Helps SEO and Builds Your Brand

Social media – does it, or does it not affect search engine rankings?

While hardly anything is absolute in the world of SEO, it is known that providing quality content to your audience is always a known metric for online success. Hopefully, this blog will help you learn how social media helps SEO and gives you some ideas on how to grow your brand.

What we want to do is look for correlations that meet a statistical threshold and use them in the relative sense for SEO best practices. There have been countless studies to determine whether social media is a ranking factor. Almost all research has established a correlation between social signals and ranking position.  But then again correlation isn’t causation.

For now, social media isn’t a search ranking factor – from Matt Cutts (Google software engineer) to Gary Illyes (Google webmaster trends analyst). Google has repeatedly been telling us this.

However, even without the direct inclusion of social media being an SEO ranking factor, they do complement each other: social media can be used to leverage your SEO efforts, even if it cannot be used to create a direct impact.

So, why aren’t social signals likely to be a ranking factor? If Google were to consider shares or community size, everyone would try gaming the system. Besides, Twitter links are nofollow – you cannot expect link authority to pass through these links. Of course, Facebook links are followed, but with millions of shares, likes, and comments taking place every minute, it would be difficult for Google to keep track.

How does Social Media Help SEO?

• It Helps Build Brand:

If you are using social media with the intention of growing your search engine rankings, you should consider another approach.

Social media is most effectively used to create and maintain your brand. Social media is incredibly effective at improving customer interaction, prompt customer service, and promoting engagement from your audience to develop a stronger connection and understand who your market is. This helps you develop both trust and authority within your industry. Ultimately, these are the key factors that help you drive traffic to your website.

The benefit to your search rankings comes indirectly as a result of this. The more engaged and connected your audience feels with your brand, the more they reference your site, make more return visits to purchase your products or tell their friends and family about the new blog you just posted. These are the benefits of social media that will indirectly increase your search engine rankings.

It would be safe to assume Google uses social media links to gauge a website’s popularity, despite the nofollow tags. However, they’re more likely to take into account ‘who are sharing your link’ rather than care about the same set of links sharing to a single website over and over again. For instance, take this case study where a celebrity endorsement of an article in the form of a tweet led them to ranking success for a very competitive keyword.

• Use Social Media to Get in Front of Your Audience:

We all know it is very difficult to get visitors to our websites. I am willing to guess that you have put a lot of hard work into what your website offers: products, services, or information.

Consider this approach when thinking of your social media strategy: rather than trying to push your products or services out to the massive audience of Facebook and Twitter, use social media as an entry point to build a connection with a specific audience you think will appreciate what you are offering.

Rather than thinking of what you can get from the people who see your social media posts, consider what you can give them. Offer free advice that might help them better their lives, brighten their day, gives them information related to your market that they will appreciate. Build a connection with your audience before asking them to purchase or give you something.

As your audience grows and begins to trust you and your brand, they are much more likely to purchase what you are selling or promote the ideas you have.

• Use Social Media To Promote Content:

Once you have built an audience who trusts you and your brand, it is perfectly fine to then promote your products or services. Just be aware that users on social media are not there to look for their newest purchases or to be sold services. Most often, they are on social media to see what their friends and family are up to or to find funny cat videos and silly memes.

Think of your desired audience, determine what their motivations are, and present your products, service, or information in a way that will relate to their mindset while surfing Facebook or Twitter.

By creating engaging social media posts linking back to your website, you can leverage your social media audience to acquire high-quality backlinks.

• More Links, Faster Indexing:

The more people who share your links on social media, the more opportunities people have to view your content. In fact, both Bing and Google have stated that they consider links shared on Twitter and Facebook through tweets and shares as beneficial in building your website domain authority.

It doesn’t matter if your link was shared via Facebook or Twitter – if you have quality content, you will get links from other websites. Likewise, links from social media also allow Google to see your links faster.

Generally speaking, some of the common social media SEO best practices would include building true followers, encouraging your audience to share inbound links to your website, and encourage social sharing to grow your brand awareness. Also, reaching your local target audience with localized content is a great way to build connection and community online with content that is relevant to your city or community.

Conclusion:

If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest in the world. Twitter users across the world send more than 500 million tweets a day! And not to forget YouTube – it is the second largest search engine in the world. Search ranking boost or not, it would be foolish to ignore how social media helps SEO and its worldwide reach. If you are a business planning a marketing strategy, consider fun, engaging ways up your social game and start growing your brand!