Search engine optimization (SEO) has evolved greatly over the years, especially recently with the fast growth of social media. Gone are the days when digital marketers stuffed their digital content with a long list of keywords, developed duplicate content produced “fake” websites. Today, search engines combine many of factors, other than just keywords, in their algorithms to make sure that they are able to give the most relevant results.
After recent SEO developments, a new influential factor to search results and ranking is social media activity. However, the direct correlation between social media and SEO has been quite hazy. Regardless, the results in Google searches and various efforts from digital marketer show that social media has a great influence over SEO, and can contribute to growth of organic traffic. These are some of the ways social media activity helps boost SEO.
Growing Brand Awareness
Social media is a very effective tool in building brand and content awareness. Each like, retweet, or share your content leads to a potential audience. High brand awareness yields better results that would reflect on your site performance.
Increased Search Query, Traffic Volume, and Site Engagement
When more people are exposed to your brand, more people are likely to search for them through search engines. Moreover, posting on social media allows you to build both direct and indirect links to your websites, resulting to higher traffic volume and site engagement. Search engines see your brand as popular when they find that more people are searching for you and visiting your page.
More Web Authority
Your reputation as a credible and reliable source is an important factor for search rankings. Prior to social media, search engines usually determine this only through the number of sites that contain links to you. However, your social media influence is also taken with great consideration to prove your authority in the top results. You can manage your content better and make them more visible by linking your content in Google+. This helps you associate all the content you’ve made to your Google+ results, and therefore builds credibility and trust for your audience.
Personalized Search Results
Google also uses your Google+ activity when signed in, to give you results that will most likely be relevant to you. This way people are likely to see content from their Circles first compared to those who aren’t part of their networks. On the other hand, Bing uses Facebook data to personalize search results for various consumers. This is why growing your network on social media is vital to SEO results. Maintain your Google+ accounts and always make an effort in growing your following authentically across all social media platforms.
Better Profile Ranking
The more content and engagement your social media has, the more you are able to build your online presence, and the more likely social media will boost your SEO and improve profile results. It then increases brand awareness, which leads to an increase in searches, site traffic, engagement, and authority. All of these web activities affect each other.
SEO and social media marketing don’t work overnight. Although they overlap each other, both wouldn’t be effective without content that matters to your audience. Without content that is informative and relevant, then your pages will certainly be stuck in the last pages of your search engine results.