Search engine optimization has grown to
become one of the most important facets of the modern economy, with major
corporations and small businesses alike rushing to cater to major search
engines like Google in order to bolster their reach. Despite the rise of social
media platforms over the past few years, however, little attention is being
paid to the way that social media affects SEO, especially for small businesses
trying to leverage these digital tools to make up for their lack of market
share.
How does social media affect SEO, and what
do business owners and marketing professionals need to know about leading
platforms like Facebook and Twitter to succeed? Here’s everything we know about
social media and its impact on SEO results.
Search
engines have relied on social signals before
One of the most interesting aspects of SEO
and social media is that major search engines like Google and Bing have
previously admitted to relying on social signals before. While many modern
marketing experts note that social signals would likely be a lackluster way of
getting better SEO results in this day and age, just a few years ago the two
biggest names in the game were tapping into social signals in an effort to
deliver better results to users everywhere. This has led many to believe that
Google could still be using such signal tapping today in an effort to produce
next-generation SEO, though there are reasons to believe that times have
changed when it comes to social media.
A former head of Google’s webspam team
publicly tackled the subject of social media and SEO
in the past, for instance, arguing that the company didn’t take social signals
into consideration anymore when weighing results. This contradictory stance may
seem confusing, but the reality of the SEO landscape is that just about every
tactic under the sun has been tried at least once, so it should be of little
surprise that Google once experimented with social signals but now finds them a
lackluster option. The modern SEO landscape is clearly gravitating away from
social signals, which seem promising but don’t deliver fantastic results.
Social activity isn’t actually meaningful
at the end of the day, but the results of that social activity could be very
important from an SEO standpoint. Improved rankings on Google could lead to
greater social media activity around your topic, for instance, though just
because people are buzzing about your product or service on Facebook you don’t
want to assume they’ll be more likely to buy it. Links from social media
platforms probably don’t carry the weight as links from other respected sites,
either, but that doesn’t mean social media is worthless when it comes to SEO.
You
can’t look at just one metric
When determining how
social media affects SEO, you can’t look at just one metric. As on local SEO service
company advises, you need to have a comprehensive understanding of the industry
that enables you to see that increased social media activity may not impact
your search results directly, but that indirect chatter could contribute to
certain social signals which are demonstrably taken into consideration by
leading search engines like Google when they’re combing over results. Getting
people to share your content on social media when they’re immensely popular,
for instance, could ignite a link building campaign which produces drastic
results in your favor.
As more marketers and business owners wake
up to the potential of using social media in their link building
strategies, they’ll come to realize that popular platforms like Facebook and
Twitter are defined by virality. When high-profile users begin posting about
something, they can generate literally thousands of links in a heartbeat that
can propel your results to the top of Google’s page. In this regard, social
media has a huge impact on SEO that’s often misunderstood even by savvy
industry professionals.
At the end of the day, SEO always come down to
content that’s worth linking back to, and social media platforms thrive when
they have topics that engage users. Thus, SEO content that’s tailor-made to
flourish on social media platforms will quickly be spread, producing social
signals that indirectly boost your SEO results. Over time, more marketing
professionals and small business owners will doubtlessly come to realize the
important ways that social media affects SEO.