New content gets published on Google every day. This makes it hard to beat the competition and appear higher on search result pages, even with a great SEO strategy.
However, with 59% of the world’s population using social media platforms, the influence of social media on people is massive. Furthermore, the same source claims that the average daily usage of social media is currently 2 hours and 29 minutes!
So, even though social media does not directly impact SEO, it can support your efforts to rank on search engines in various ways. Thus, small and mid-size businesses, as well as large organizations, should constantly work to improve their social media presence.
But before diving into the benefits of social SEO, let’s cover the basics.
What is Social SEO?
Social SEO refers to social media activities that are believed to influence search engine rankings. However, Google does not recognize social media as a ranking factor. Therefore, the links you generate from social media posts do not impact your organic rankings.
However, there are indirect SEO benefits that come with certain social media activities. For example, if one of your social media posts goes viral, other websites can pick up on it. Some of these websites may proceed to link to your website. This generates naturally earned backlinks which can increase your rankings.
That’s only one of the various ways social media activities can benefit your SEO efforts. Next, let’s quickly go over why social media is important for SEO.
Why is Social Media Important for SEO?
Social media give businesses a massive opportunity to be found. This is especially important for small to medium-sized businesses that don’t have the strongest SEO. Social media can help you build brand awareness and drive traffic to your website as you continue to invest in SEO.
Here are some stats for you; 1.62 billion users visit Facebook daily. YouTube records over 1 billion hours of videos played on the platform every day. Therefore, every post, tweet, and video you publish can be consumed and shared by millions of social media users.
But beyond the opportunity to get noticed, there are other reasons why social media is important for your SEO. These include:
- The inbound links help to get more organic search traffic to your website from social media.
- It helps build your brand’s identity, increasing branded searches.
- It can help you generate more social signals
- Builds a strong audience or following.
Let’s dive deeper and discuss the top four benefits of social SEO for your business.
4 Benefits of Social SEO For Your Business
If you want to grow your business, people need to know about you. Social SEO can help you with that. Here’s how:
1. Builds Brand Authority
One of the most important benefits of social SEO for your business is that it can help build your brand authority. For new business owners who need to take care of tons of things, like finding out how to apply for a business license, speaking with suppliers and clients, etc., building brand authority can seem like a challenge.
A consistent social media campaign can help you build trust with your target audience. If you strategically post valuable content on social media platforms, you will gain more followers. More people will also start to recognize your brand. They will know exactly who you are and what kind of content you create. There is no coincidental following on social media. People choose to follow and trust your brand.
Engage with your social media followers every day. If you grow your online community big, you’ll get noticed by other brands and search engines, even if not directly. Comment, like, share, and respond to questions on social media. Reply to private messages regularly. This tactic will help you to engage and build trust and authority.
You can also boost your brand authority by publishing social proof. People want to see testimonials, and reviews, read the opinions of other clients, etc. Social media is a great way to collect and present social proof.
Social SEO also allows you to build brand authority by providing a platform where you can share quality and educational content from your site. This helps establish you as an expert in your field.
Guides, quality blog posts, and “How-to” content are especially great ideas. You can share these posts on social media. Or, repurpose them and share them as Twitter threads.
Creating engaging and original content can result in high-authority websites noticing it. As a result, your content can be quoted on popular websites, ultimately boosting your domain authority and SEO.
2. Increase Your Branded Search Traffic
Social media marketing helps to grow your brand awareness. When more people know about your products or services, it’s natural that more of them will search for your brand in the search engines.
A branded search is a query typed into search engines that includes your brand’s name or a branded keyword. So, for example, “Nike trainers” is a branded search, whereas “trainers” is a non-branded search.
When search engines detect an increase in your branded searches, they will start associating your business with a particular product. This can ultimately improve your rankings for branded searchers and the non-branded search too.
So, the more branded searches and clicks your content gets, the higher search rankings your web pages will likely get.
Also, since these searches are from people who are already aware of your brand, the bounce rate will be lower. Lowering the bounce rate impacts the rankings positively. Your site will rank higher on the results pages as a result.
To benefit from social SEO, create optimized social media profiles and stay active. You want people to start looking for products by typing your brand name on the search bar.
3. Creates Better Link-Building Opportunities
A good link-building strategy plays a massive role in your SEO. Backlinks are links from other websites to yours. The more backlinks from quality websites, the better SEO results for you.
Google Analytics doesn’t read backlinks from social media as such. However, promoting links through social profiles can result in more backlinks.
Every social media user, blogger, or business is a potential backlink source. If you provide high-quality content that people want to read, sharing it on social media profiles makes it easier for others to find and cite. So, the links you share across social platforms increase brand exposure.
Businesses can effectively automate some of their repeatable SEO processes to free up their time for other tasks. So, for example, you can use online tools, like WebCEO, to keep track of backlinks, especially the toxic ones, or ensure the content is optimized with the best keywords.
If you need to keep an eye on multiple tasks and easily prioritize your tasks, you will benefit from using a sprint planning template tool. Your marketing team will appreciate such smart tools that make it easy for everyone to get on the same page thanks to quick and easy communication.
4. Helps to Understand Your Customers Better
Social SEO can help you understand the ever-changing ways that people search on the web. Once you master this, it’ll get easier to find the right keywords and queries your customers will be typing when seeking solutions to their problems.
Apart from surveys and questionnaires, social listening is one of the ways you can learn what the audience wants. Social listening means monitoring social media channels for mentions and conversations about your brand.
You can engage and track various types of conversations from your audience on social media. Then analyze the information to discover opportunities to act on. So, if you see a positive comment about your product or brand, respond by commenting or liking the post. If you see someone complaining, reply to them as well in an apological way.
Learn which social media channels your target audience spends the most time on. Most users have some kind of social media presence.
Using social media monitoring tools, like Hootsuite or Nexalogy, is helpful in discovering what people are saying about your brand. Anything related to your product, your competitors, your niche, your new product, your customer service, etc. If people are talking about it, the tool will let you know.
With this knowledge, you can start creating content people want to consume. Crafted specifically to your target audience’s needs and easy to find, thanks to using the right keyword strategy. This tactic will give Google and other search engines your content as the most relevant solution to people’s problems.
Conclusion
Although not directly, your social popularity or presence supports your ranking efforts on Google. Therefore it’s critical to focus your digital marketing efforts on social SEO.
Working on your social SEO can bring your company great benefits. From building your brand authority and increasing your branded search traffic to creating link-building opportunities. Social SEO can also help you understand your customers better, which you can leverage to ensure you give customers exactly what they need.
Social media and SEO have a dynamic correlation your brand shouldn’t ignore. Go on and make sure your Social SEO strategy is spot on.
Author Bio:
Austin Andrukaitis
Entrepreneur Leadership Network Writer
Austin Andrukaitis is the CEO of ChamberofCommerce.com. He’s an experienced digital marketing strategist with many years of experience in creating successful online campaigns. Austin’s approach to developing, optimizing, and delivering web-based technologies has helped businesses achieve higher profit, enhance productivity, and position organizations for accelerated sustained growth.
