Social Media does not directly affect SEO, but it does play an important role in ranking signal and traffic reach. It indirectly affects your ranking because when a reader lands on your website through a social media post, your site gets more visibility.

Social Media SEO refers to how social media platforms boost your site’s organic traffic through search engines. Social media makes your SEO activities more effective and provides a connecting link between your business and customers.

Reasons Why You Should Use Social Media For SEO

Social media marketing is all about making the most of social media networks to target the right audience. An effective social marketing strategy needs to have a solid plan in place.

Social media content that is published regularly makes a huge difference in the content marketing campaign as all social media posts get crawled by search engine spiders and get indexed.

If your blog posts get attention on social sites like Twitter or Facebook, it’ll end up getting indexed at a quicker pace. Search engines find such content because of social factors. And, if the post goes viral, then it can rank higher in SERP.

Search engines give a lot of attention to the site’s authority. If your web page has a high value, it’ll gain a higher authority. As you publish high-quality content and gain more relevant backlinks, your site’s authority will grow along.

A good chunk of website content is distributed via social media platforms. It means that your authority on social media will have a direct impact on your level of authority. If you create content about finance and get backlinks from blogs that write about finance, your site will get more relevance and authority.

Also, search engines are now finding ways to move beyond the technical stuff. So, your SEO tactics need to have a human touch, which is possible through real-time interaction you make on social media platforms.

Through social media, you’ll get to know what type of content is consumed and what resonates with your audience. It’ll also let you know about your marketing impact and improvements that need to be made.

How Social Media Impact Your SEO?

1. More Quality Backlinks

Both the quality and quantity of backlinks affect your site and determines how well your site will rank. When you focus on the right social media marketing tactics, you’ll attract the right backlinking opportunities.

If your content has a higher number of social shares it’ll get noticed not only by different influencers and target audience but also by webmasters who might want to link to your site. Today social media is not restricted to shares, but it is all about the right advantage.

Backlinks play an important factor in the ranking of a website. When you publish high-quality content, you’ll be able to generate a higher amount of engagement on your posts. And a higher amount of engagement will get you the backlinks that you need for your site.

2. Increase Branded Searches

Your online marketing campaign includes growing your audience and building a strong brand. Your social media profile helps you to create a relationship with your target audience.

When you regularly update your social media page with posts and provide quality information, it helps in brand recognition, and your audience starts seeing you as a trusted source.

Social media marketing helps provide the right kind of visibility to your brand, thereby creating brand awareness. Once your brand is popular, you’ll find more people clicking on your content on search engine pages.

As Google gives importance to click-through-rates, it can impact your rankings and increase visibility. By building brand awareness, you’ll have more people searching for your brand which will boost the organic search traffic on your social page and website.

3. Improves Your Content Reach

Social media provides a platform that ensures your content reaches as many people as possible. Better content reach results in high traffic and ranks your site higher in SERP. A random post you create on social media can have a good reach and help increase engagement. It is also possible that once someone shares your social post, some other person might share it again.

After a while, the reach of the post increases, giving you results that you never expected in the first place. Through social media, you can also get influencers to share your post or brand. Brand partnerships can help to increase organic reach, giving your business a new boost.

4. Tap to Local Searches (Local SEO)

The power of local searches helps to increase your ranking through social media sites. The Name, Address, and Phone number of your business are a part of your local search ranking.

If you maintain consistency in NAP information across all the listings of the website, Google will consider your business more authentic. Alternately, some social media websites let you geo-tag your social media posts.

This is another great way to gain more visibility among the local audience searching for your product. Instagram gives users the function to conduct searches on the geotagging feature.

When your product features in the search results, you’ll be able to attract more visitors this way. The reviews or testimonials on your social media pages also attract local customers as more than 86% of customers read reviews about local businesses.
Your social media profiles will appear in search results and show snippets of your reviews. This will attract a curious audience to visit your website.

5. Build a Strong Following

When you create a great product, it is the first step towards achieving your marketing goals. But for this, you’ll need to spread the word about your product or service so that it reaches the right target audience.

If your audience does not know about your product offering, they will not visit your site. That’s why you need to put in more effort to reach your target audience.

If you are proactive, the results will be great. Through social media, you’ll be able to build a web presence, which will help you connect to your audience.
You need to create social media posts that have an emotional value and get you a strong following. When the social reach or following increases, your ranking will also increase.

The right impact

Post useful and high-quality content on your social media pages to create the right impact. This will help you to gain traction, increase your content reach, and generate more backlinks. You’ll be able to enhance your brand reputation as links from social media also helps Google with indexing.

Indexation can lead to more traffic and eventually improve the ranking of your website. When you formulate your SEO policies, don’t forget to leverage the power of social media as it will give your small or medium-sized business much-needed visibility.

Author Bio

Nirav Dave is a Tech & Social enthusiast. He is also a Web Entrepreneur by Profession and loves to write about the latest trends in Social Media & SEO. You may also follow him on Twitter | Facebook