6 Effects Of Social Media On Your SEO That You Should Know About
Even though it’s known that social media activity attracts an audience to your website, increases your digital footprint and boosts your brand awareness, a lot of people still find its relationship to SEO somewhat confusing.
On the one hand, it’s clear that it helps, but how and why often seem obscure. Some might suggest that if something is working the reason why is irrelevant but this is A) not very entrepreneurial and B) not good enough for those who are willing to make some upgrades.
There are several effects of social media on your SEO that you should know about. Here are some of them:
1. Are social media links really backlinks?
One of the first questions that everyone always asks when it comes to SEO and social media is – are social media links really backlinks?
Even though they aren’t necessarily the same, the fact is that social media backlinks do impact your rank. On the one hand, these links are ‘no follow’ which means that they don’t count when it comes to the traditional form of SEO ranking.
Nonetheless, just because they’re ‘no follow’ this doesn’t mean that they’re useless or that they don’t count. They attract an audience, lower bounce rate and, overall, raise brand awareness. All of these factors, indirectly, boost your rank.
2. Higher traffic
Regardless if these links count as backlinks or not, a person who clicks on the link tends to end back on your website. This means that your social media activity definitely increases your traffic by quite a bit. The best thing about this is that you have so much opportunity to link back to your website.
First of all, you can do this in every piece of content you create. Second, you can include links in your bio, profile’s contact info, tweets and about pages. Also, content descriptions (like video description on YouTube) are also great opportunities for you to insert a link once again.
3. An indicator of audience interest
Another great metric that could end up being pivotal for your SEO attempts are brand mentions that your business gets on social media. In fact, there are some scenarios where it’s more reliable to look for a suitable keyword (especially long-tail keyword) here than in a specialized engine.
Here, you can see what your audience really has to say about your business, which also provides you with invaluable feedback. Nonetheless, the only way for you to get the real picture is for you to engage in an elaborate social media monitoring campaign, conducted by niche professionals from the best social media marketing agencies.
4. Longer content life
Perhaps the best thing about social media in marketing is a chance for you to recycle your content, thus prolonging its life. First, you can upload content on your blog and promote it by sharing it on social media. However, what happens when someone decides to share this piece of content on their social media in one or two weeks?
Well, if you’re lucky enough, this process will restart and you’ll drastically prolong the life of your content. With that in mind, your social media activity is making your content marketing much more effective.
Needless to say, content marketing is one of the key components of any effective SEO campaign.
5. YouTube videos in search results
As of recently, there’s a policy about mandatory three YouTube videos in most Google search results. Still, this might only urge you to learn how to make your YouTube videos rank better or get closer attention from Google.
In other words, it’s a massive opportunity that you can’t afford to miss out on. Also, keep in mind that this is not the first attempt by Google to play its own platform as a favorite.
In the past one’s Google+ activity had a direct impact on their Google rank. Sure, this couldn’t help prolong the life of this social network, which resulted in the shutdown of this network.
The trend that was displayed this way, on the other hand, is more than revealing and indicative.
As video content continues to be on a rise and Video content is said to represent 80% of all Internet traffic in 2019, marketers need to reconsider their video marketing strategy.
6. Social media actions create favorable outcomes
The last thing you should understand is the fact that different social media actions have different outcomes.
For instance, social shares are an amazing SEO opportunity, yet, they’re not nearly as important as social impressions, due to the fact that they affect the way in which audience interacts with your brand. Also, creator impressions make quite the difference.
Here, we’re mostly talking about impressions made by bloggers, journalists, researchers, event producers and podcasters.
All of these creators help your business appear in the different form, which, in turn, reduces your bounce rate, by offering your audience with a variety of content.
As you can see, social media marketing activity always results in a better SEO status for your business. Nonetheless, this doesn’t mean that you can just forsake all the traditional SEO methods and focus on social media marketing instead.
The truth is that you need both, SEO as a core of your digital footprint-boosting activity and social media marketing as its enhancer (and a stand-alone branding tool). You can look forward to results that your brand truly deserves only by taking such a holistic approach.
