Even though it’s not usually discussed, we wholeheartedly believe that your social media and SEO should go hand in hand. They could be valuable allies, with social media boosting your site’s rankings. The important part is knowing how to combine the two strategies for maximum impact.

In this article, we’ll show you how much social media impacts your SEO and which social media platforms are the best, with actionable tips on improving your search rankings.

How does social media impact SEO?

Social media won’t directly affect your SEO rankings. The links you share on social platforms, though, do increase brand awareness, and that helps out your SEO in a few different ways:

  • Enhancing your logo & brand recognition
  • Improving online visibility
  • Enhancing your organic traffic
  • Increasing the lifespan of your posts

The biggest benefit is how distributing your content on more platforms helps search engines figure out what type of content people enjoy.

When people share your content on social media, it doesn’t directly impact your SEO but it does send social signals, indicating that your content is helpful and useful. Once search engines pick up on that, they will push your site more.

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A big plus side of social media is the ability to create and foster a loyal community. If you’re offering engaging, valuable, and educational content, your followers will likely keep coming back to your pages. To assess the effectiveness of your social media efforts, it's important to regularly check your website traffic. By monitoring your site's visitor statistics, you can gain insights into the audience coming from your social media channels. You can then leverage this data to further refine your strategies and foster even stronger community engagement, ultimately sustaining a healthy inflow of website traffic

If they share your posts, more people will see them and start visiting your page, which will in turn drive traffic to your website.

Links on social media don’t have the same value as backlinks do in the greater scheme of SEO, but they bring awareness to your website and in turn increase your chances of editors linking to your blog posts. So, while social media can somehow help you with this process, it's important to acquire quality backlinks through other activities as well, such as guest posting or link exchanges. After the backlinks are built you need to conduct the backlink monitoring.

Another benefit to keep in mind is the role social media plays in the perception of your brand. Brands with a great social media strategy and customer support via social platforms experience an increase in customer satisfaction. Brands can also embed social media widget for website to leverage the benefits of social media for business.

The more people are satisfied with your brand, the more positive reviews you’ll have, which will impact what Google ranks you for. This means that Google utilizes online mentions in order to categorize search queries and the more positive your mentions are, the bigger the benefits will be.

Best social platforms for SEO

Certain social media platforms are great for SEO because they appear in searches and rank high on SERPs. It makes sense, since your audience will likely want to visit your website as well as social media when researching.

Websites can offer a lot of valuable content, but social media gives you a closer look into the brand and its values, and offers a more personalized experience. The reason behind that is that it is easy to contact brands through direct messages and receive a response fairly quickly, whether it’s sending a message or making a call.

Every social media platform has a specific algorithm that pushes engaging content to the top, as well as posts similar to the ones you previously interacted with.

Let’s see which social media platforms are the best for improving your SEO rankings.

Facebook

Facebook is one of the most popular social media platforms. The thing that sets it apart from other popular social media networks is how easy it is to share blog posts, write longer post descriptions, and post links.

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Google even indexes Facebook pages, meaning it can read those pages and provide them as search results. For even easier searches, Google also indexes Facebook comments. With this in mind, here are a few ways you can use Facebook pages to improve your SEO:

  • Create posts that answer most searched questions people have about your brand, product, or service
  • Launch your products and services on Facebook and make sure to include lengthy copy that describe how your products and services are used
  • When you launch a new feature, make sure to create a post talking about how it works with older features and give your audience tips on using it
  • Reshare your most important and engaging content

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is not just the platform for finding jobs, it can do so much more for you, especially when it comes to generating new leads. This alone is enticing enough for marketers to use LinkedIn, but the way this platform can help you in your SEO efforts is no laughing matter, either.

If you use the right keywords in your profile and use relevant words through your content, which can also be done with the help of an SEO writing assistant, the search algorithm may push you to the top of SERPs.

LinkedIn is also great at helping your branded searches. That would include searches in which people are looking for specific companies and brands. A great way to boost your SEO via LinkedIn is by optimizing your profile, growing the number of your connections, and encouraging them to engage with your content.

The last step is crucial in increasing your branded searches. As we mentioned before, Google values engaging content that helps people and will rank it higher than the content they find unhelpful.

Twitter

Twitter is another social media platform that is mostly focused on text content, instead of pictures, which is why it’s a great platform for helping your SEO. Not only can you help your SEO with social signals, but you can also help your website rank on SERPs.

Since Twitter is based on sharing posts that other people can engage with and share with their followers, you have to make sure to share quality content. Your content needs to be sharable and make sure to use hashtags to boost your visibility.

Hashtags help make your tweets searchable and help people discover your profile, which builds brand awareness and increases traffic. In order to see a noticeable change in your SEO, you need to be consistent.

Tweet out your new blog posts, as well as older ones that you want to put in the spotlight. Make sure to ask your followers questions and keep them engaged. You’ll drive traffic to your site, increase engagement, and send social signals to Google.

Guide for improving your SEO

The long-term goal of your SEO efforts, just like other marketing and sales efforts, is to sell more and increase your revenue. However, your short term goals can be anything from:

  • Attracting new leads
  • Brand awareness (use branding AI tools to maintain guidelines)
  • Reputation management
  • Establishing authority
  • And more

In order to help you maximize your social media and improve your SEO, we’ve created an actionable guide that will help you create a social media strategy that you can utilize right away.

We made sure to pick tips that help you transform your content and social media posts, instead of abandoning all your marketing efforts and starting from zero. Let’s start with the type of website content you should be creating.

Is your website content shareable?

When you’re writing blogs for your site, think about the length, the value you’re bringing to your audience, and the shareability of your content.

Make sure to focus on quality over quantity, because if your strategy is to overproduce blogs, then you won’t have the time to focus on creating informative, interesting, and educational content people will want to read.

Every blog piece should be valuable and bring your audience new insight into a specific topic. Once you have a great piece of writing, you need to make it come alive with pictures, videos, infographics, and formatting.

When it comes to images, you need to make sure they are well optimized for fast loading. If it takes too long, not only will visitors bounce, but you significantly decrease the chances of the content being organically shared as well.

Make sure your images are compressed using a web tool like the ShortPixel Image Compressor. This decreases the file size without sacrificing quality, allowing for fast loading, better SEO, and more shareability.

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Having highlighted takeaways after each heading will make sure your content is shareable because it makes it very easy for your readers to copy/paste and share valuable findings with their followers.

Make sure to include social sharing buttons on your website as well, in order to encourage readers to share your blogs. Those buttons should be easy to find so that your audience doesn’t have to dig for them, but they should also not be intrusive.

Nothing should disturb the reader’s experience and you don’t want to be too pushy with pop-ups and social buttons because it will lead to a higher bounce rate and you won’t get any shares on your content.

Lastly, make sure your cover photos are interesting, relevant, and formatted for social media. That way, whenever anyone shares your blog on social media, your picture will play a significant role in whether people click on the article or not. If your pictures get cut out or have too much text on them, it won’t entice people to click on them.

Find content ideas on social media

The first step for your social media should be to optimize your profiles. Not only do optimized profiles look more professional, but people respond to them much better. It’s not uncommon for companies who want to work with you to ask not just for a SEO proposal but also your social media profiles in order to judge if you’re the right applicant.

Make sure to have all your information filled in and make it easy for people to find you and understand what your brand is about.

Once you do that, bring the focus to the post you create and share. If you’re not sure where to take your social media strategy, look at your analytics and audience feedback. What type of content are people engaging with the most, what type of content seems to fly under the radar, what other interests does your audience have etc.

You’ll find great blog topics straight from your followers, so make sure to conduct social listening. It includes finding out what people are writing about your brand, products, and services on social platforms, and what user-generated content they create.

Even if you have a good grasp of topics you want to cover on your blog, you can still find new keywords through analyzing your social media following. The main difference between social media and SEO is that social media is timely and brings fast results, while SEO plays the long game.

That way you can assess trends on social media very quickly, without waiting for search numbers to roll in.

Establish your authority

We might not know all the intricacies of how Google’s algorithm actually works, but we do know about E-A-T. It stands for expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Expertise shows how experienced the author is on the topic. Authority looks at how credible the website is and trustworthiness at how much trust people have in the domain. Google's backlink policy also emphasizes the quality of links over quantity. Links from authoritative and thematically related websites carry more weight than numerous links from lesser-known or irrelevant sources. This approach encourages website owners and content creators to focus on building genuine, organic connections and providing high-quality, authoritative content that others naturally want to link to.

Understanding how these elements - expertise, authority, trustworthiness, and a solid backlink profile - work together, helps in aligning content and SEO strategies with what Google values most. This not only aids in achieving better search engine rankings but also in establishing a trustworthy and authoritative online presence.

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Social media can help you meet these criteria. With a bulletproof social strategy that revolves around building high-quality content and creating a community, you’ll be on your way to becoming an authority in your industry.

Having an engaged community of people who over time become your micro-brand ambassadors gives potential clients a lot of input into your brand. It tells them that your products and services are great, that you have a lot of repeated purchases, and that you’re listening to your audience.

If a brand has bad customer service or low-quality products, their social media will be filled with bad and angry comments and reviews. Whenever you’re not sure about the trustworthiness of a brand, you can pretty quickly find your answer by looking at their social media.

The value of good reviews from actual customers is far greater than content brands put out about themselves, centred around how easy it is to use their services, etc. The third-party reviews are harder to ignore and they say much more about your brand than you ever could.

Key takeaways

When working on your SEO strategy, partnering with an experienced SEO service company is crucial. You should definitely include social media in your approach. If you want quicker results and a well-rounded strategy that has a wider scope, you’ll want to work on these two strategies simultaneously.

They complement each other and help you grow your business in other ways, by securing new leads, working alongside your sales funnel, and helping you establish brand authority. We’re sure that our actionable guide gave you great insight into how you can transform your current marketing strategy and start creating content for different platforms that will help you rank better on search engines.

As long as you remember that the goal is to reach new customers and sell more, you’ll easily combine social media and SEO efforts and see how easily they blend into a great marketing strategy.

Vanja Maganjić is an experienced writer with a unique passion for creating content that helps brands connect with their customers. She believes in brands that stand up to the man and thinks that storytelling is an essential part of what makes us human. Her long term goal is to become the cool auntie that gives out family-sized Kit Kats on Halloween.