It’s difficult to have missed the importance of social media these days when running a business. Most people ensure that they are regularly updating their social media which what the business is doing and how great they are. Whilst this is time consuming it is still largely free and so is extremely important to your marketing efforts.
However, a lot of these business still think of social media as a separate thing to their marketing as a whole rather than a core part of it. It is often missed that social media helps other areas of your marketing efforts namely SEO. Unless you are already an SEO or social media guru, you may find that understanding the link between your social media and SEO is a little tricky.
Although it is clear that your social media profiles do not have a direct impact Jon your ranking, it is clear that Google’s algorithm takes them into account.
While we cannot say how much is taken into account, as only some Google employees will know for sure what the shadowy algorithm looks at, it has certainly been confirmed by a few key figures over the years. Danny Sullivan, Matt Cutts and Gary Illyes have all confirmed that Google uses your social media as an indicator to determine your organic rankings.
As you may have seen, websites that are ranked at the top of the search engine results usually have excellent social media profiles.
Although indirect, there are many ways that you can use your social media presence to boost your rankings and so if your goal is to improve your SEO, social media is one part of it you should not neglect.
Here are the key points:
1. Use it to boost your content performance.
You should always be using your social media to share the content on your website. If you add a page or post a new blog, share it on your social media. This creates links to your content and so helps raise the profile of the content on your site.
Your social media profiles give you access to a much wider audience than your website alone and so you are putting yourself in front of a lot more people each time.
The more people engaging in your content, the more positive the signals that are fed back to the search engines will be and so your SEO will improve in turn.
2. It gives you way more chances of gaining backlinks.
It’s not only about getting more visitors to your website the real aim is getting people sharing your content. The more people who share your content, the more people are likely to link to it.
Links are the holy grail of SEO as they give the search engines a direct insight as to how popular your site is for a given topic. This directly influences the way that the search engines perceive you and in turn, directly affects your ranking.
You could have amazing content that people should be falling over themselves to link to but without the visibility you can gain via social media, it may go completely unnoticed. The people who see it on social media will want their friends to see it and so will share it for everyone to enjoy as well.
You don’t need a large amount of followers to get your content spreading quickly and easily. It just needs one person to share it and link to it and you will start seeing the benefits.
3. Your social profiles could be ranking for your search terms as well.
Every business would like to see the whole of page one search results take up by pages of their website, who wouldn’t but your social media profiles can be up there as well, giving yo a better chance of this happening.
If people are specifically looking for your company and using branded search terms, there is no reason why your social profiles would not come up as well.
If you have a potential customer who has not made their mind up or doesn’t get the right feel from your website, having an engaging social media presence might be just the prod they need to engage with your company.
Your social media profiles can give them a different perspective on what your company is about and how well they treat their customers.
4. You will generate more website traffic.
Obviously the end goal of SEO is to bring more targeted traffic to your website but it isn’t the only way to bring more traffic in. Make sure that you stay active on your social media and keep posting engaging content which will in turn help bring people in to the website.
All you need to do is post about something relevant to your business, pop a few relevant hashtags in there and you could have a whole new group of customers very quickly.
As SEO can take months to have an effect, using social media to quickly gain visitors is an excellent, and free, way to get that easy traffic that is so important.
5. Great social media accounts can build confidence.
SEO is all about trust and popularity and so using your social profiles to do this is a key way to make people trust and want to visit your website.
As there is an ever growing number of options available to consumers, you need to be doing everything that you can to gain their trust and make them feel comfortable doing business with you.
A poor or non existent social media presence can be a major red flag to a potential customer. Most businesses are extremely active on social media and as such are likely to have reviews etc that are essential in the trust gaining game.
Your social media accounts also give you a chance to humanise your brand. Rather than give them a slightly faceless website, you can keep people up to date with what the office dog is doing or where you are out and about doing business. All of this make people more comfortable with engaging with you.
To summarise….
You should always ensure that everything you do with your business from a marketing perspective works together. Your SEO efforts should definitely include your social media efforts and they are so much more effective when they support each other.
As social media is free and incredibly powerful, it really should be number one on your list of things to keep on top of.
Don’t forget that here at Boost366 we can help increase your likes and follows across all of your social media channels which will bring in a lot more visitors to your site.
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