Social Media and SEO

September 16 , 2016 | BY admin

The fact is social media does have a big impact on SEO and your website’s organic rankings.  The hard part is establishing and maintaining a presence on social media in order to reap the benefits of seeing increased web traffic and leads from your efforts.

A little over 3 years ago at the end of 2010, for the first time Google acknowledged that a presence on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and others work into their algorithm and does in fact have an affect on your rankings.  Google held their cards close to their vest and really did not provide many details as to what they look at, but it’s the starting of 2014 and the footprint you leave on social media is as important as ever for your organic rankings and it’s not going to change anytime soon.  Although continually evolving, we hope to help shed some light on how establishing a strong social media presence can help your SEO efforts, increase organic rankings, and ultimately drive more website traffic.

So why does social media play an important role on organic rankings?

It is believed that social media sharing determines in large part where you rank naturally.  Similarly to how content is ranked based on what search engines consider to be most relevant to that search query, search engines now put more emphasis on social media activity.  For example, if you are a lawyer and write a blog that has great content on “Criminal Law in Chicago”, post it on twitter, Facebook and other social media sites, and this is shared by your followers 100 more times, the search engines look at this content as being more relevant than something that wasn’t shared at all and should have higher visibility on search engines.  The bottom line is if your content is not being shared by others, it is not deemed as relevant to the search engines and will have significantly lower visibility.  Additionally search engines such as Bing have implemented what they call “personalized search” which takes into account what your friends like on Facebook while signed in.  Below we provided a short list of the relationship between social media and SEO.

  1. More Social Connections Means Better RankingsThe more the merrier.  The number of followers, likes etc. is important when the content you share is ranked.  Although quantity is a big factor, quality is as well.  You want to connect with influencers who are sharing great content and are considered relevant in addition to your target markets.
  2. Domain AuthorityThe more content that is shared on your website, the better rankings you will see over time.  Every piece of content that is shared helps increase your domain authority and improves its long-term health.
  3. Sharing Your ContentThe more your content is shared on social media sites, the more relevant search engines will look at it when determining rankings.  Additionally, the more your content is shared the more links that are achieved and the higher you will show up in searches.
  4. Personalized SearchSearch engines understand people search many different ways.  If someone in New York conducts a search for “baseball”, the same person in Chicago will see different results.  Also if you are signed into Facebook and conduct a search, Bing will organize results based on what your friends may have liked and Google may provide results of friends that have tweeted or +1’d information.

We’ve shared some basic information on how social media impacts SEO and wanted to provide a few simple steps on how to establish and maintain a social media presence.  It’s not brain surgery, but is important that you allocate enough time each week if you want to achieve your desired results.

What You Can Do To Establish and Maintain a Strong Social Presence

-Set up business profiles on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+

-Start a blog:  About 2/3rds of daily internet users read blogs, there’s an appetite for YOUR great content.

-Set up an RSS feed on your site:  According to www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics, “About 46% of daily internet users read more than one blog every day.”  Adding an RSS feed makes it super easy for users to get your latest posts and news stories as soon as you publish them.

-Let them Share!  It’s a simple concept, encourage readers to share your content by adding social sharing buttons on your blog.  According to Hubspot, content that is shared on sites such as Facebook and Twitter get almost 150% more inbound links to those that are not shared at all.

-They want more…Add social and email subscription fields on your blog to make it easy for readers of your content to see it as soon as it is published.

-Patience is a Virtue!  Make sure to continually engage socially.  The biggest mistake business owners make is they don’t see the results right away and give up.  With social media playing such an important role in SEO and your online health, that could be a big mistake.