The search industry is always abuzz about how social media can influence SEO. Social media SEO refers to how social media activities can boost your website’s organic traffic through search engines. It’s a topic that never gets old. The reason is simple: social media is essential for SEO in more than one way. It not only makes your SEO activities effective but also lucrative. Yes, social media and SEO might look different, but there’s no doubt that they help each other.
However, contrary to popular belief, social media doesn’t directly contribute to SEO. In other words, social signals don’t directly help rank better. The links that you share on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest may help your brand get more exposure, but Google doesn’t see them as a ranking signal.
Nevertheless, optimizing social media will still benefit your website’s SEO stats. And here are the reasons:
Social Media Content Is Indexed
The right type of social media content published on a regular basis can make a huge difference in your overall content marketing campaign. And when you find out that your social media posts can get crawled by search engine spiders and get indexed, things get better.
Now, this doesn’t mean that every tweet or post you make finds its way to Google’s vast index. It has to be relevant enough so that they can be found by people searching for similar content. For example, if you search for Oprah Winfrey, you will find most of the top results are her social media profiles/pages because it’s relevant to the search query.
What’s even better is that social media can help you get your website’s content indexed faster because of how search engines treat social media content. If your blog post gets a lot of attention on Facebook or Twitter, it will end up getting in the index at a quicker pace. Search engine spiders are able to find such content easily because of the social factor. So if your post goes viral on social media, the ripples can be felt in the search engine result pages.
Social Media Build Authority
Search engines give a lot of weight to a website’s authority, making it a critical SEO factor to focus on. In the eyes of search engines, if your page or domain has high value, it has high authority. And a better chance to rank above sites with not-so-strong authority.
Back when social media didn’t exist, the link-building world was different. Fast forward to today, you can’t ignore social media when talk about building backlinks. Why? Because a good chunk of content on the web is distributed via social media. It’s the biggest content distribution engine. This means your influence or authority on social media networking sites has a direct impact on the level of authority.
Social Media Help You Reach Real People
While SEO has a technical side to it, it’s not only thing you should be focused on. Most of the blackhat or unethical SEO practices are technical in nature, and yet fail to give long-term results because they take the “user” out of the equation. These methods are not about people, when search engines are specifically looking for a human touch.
Search engines have always tried to find a better way to serve users and move beyond the technical stuff. If you want to rank a web property in 2019, you can’t just depend on technical factors such as keyword optimization.