The Ways Social Media Can Improve SEO Outcomes

Search engine optimisation continues to be one of the most important tactics for brands that need to increase exposure. Finding the right niche, maximising performance in the search engines and ultimately converting that traffic into followers and customers is at the core of marketing in general.

However, we have seen a recent trend where social media has surpassed search engines as the primary form of marketing for many brands. Rather than putting in long hours and waiting patiently for the results, social media marketers have found that spending a bit of money can go a long way toward improving traffic.

Much like search engines, social media provides both paid and organic opportunities. On the organic front, social media can actually improve SEO outcomes – even though conventional wisdom suggests one does not affect the other. Let’s talk about how social media can improve SEO outcomes for brands and businesses.

Optimised Posts = Better Rankings

It’s important to remember that de-facto SEO practices do not revolve solely around the 10 primary positions on each SERP. There are numerous additional elements in every SERP where your website can be featured. Excluding paid campaigns through AdWords, there’s the Knowledge Graph, news sections, map results, and latest social media commentary sections. According to the best web hosting providers, optimising your social media posts for the SERPs you’d target anyway with on-site content, can help dramatically increase your chances of appearing in one or more of these areas. Even though it may not abide by the standards of traditional SEO, ranking well in these elements ultimately gives you the same exposure (and therefore traffic).

More Followers, More Juice

While there have historically not been connections between content posting on social media and SEO rankings, there are social signals and metrics that do affect your rankings as of today. One example is the number of followers your profile(s) have. For those with hundreds of thousands of followers, their rankings will be better than those with merely hundreds.

It’s important to point out that the number of followers alone won’t improve SEO. Search engines can actually tell whether you have a large audience of relevant followers or a bunch of Twitter eggs you bought. Because of this, steer clear of buying likes and followers.

Increased Brand Authority

Even though there isn’t a direct correlation between social media and SEO, indirect and subtle correlations are present. One of them is the domain authority you can achieve with many shares across social media. As your social media presence continues to grow and more people share your content, this validates your brand to search engines. Such actions provide tiny pings and indicators to search engines that your social media presence – and therefore, the domain it is associated with – is valid, meaningful and influential, which leads to better rankings.

While social media still doesn’t influence SEO the same way quality content, link building and other cornerstones do, it does have an impact. These three benefits should all motivate you to implement a more aggressive and thorough social media strategy.