When it comes to search engine optimization, things can get a little tricky with all the blurred lines and hypotheses about how certain practices can affect your search rankings. And while Google has stated that social signals aren’t directly influencing their ranking algorithm, that definitely doesn’t mean that social media marketing can’t indirectly be a huge contributor to the amount of SEO success your business can have. To understand how, check out the three following social media tips to help make your SEO efforts more worthwhile.
Showing Off Your Social Profiles
Rather than thinking about SEO in terms of how you can work the system to artificially make your business or website seem more important, try thinking about SEO and your search rankings as the result of your genuine effort to make your customers’ or clients’ online experience with your brand as meaningful as possible.
One great way to make this happen is to create amazing social media profiles for your business. While this may seem like a waste of time to some because it doesn’t directly influence rankings, Chloe Mason Gray, a contributor to KISSmetrics.com, shares that social media profile are ranked in search results by Google and are often the first touch people will have with your brand if they search for you. For this reason, it’s vital that you take the time and effort needed to have solid social media profiles that accurately represent your brand.
Taking Advantage of Twitter
Twitter is a great tool for your business to use in order to become more relevant by using social media. In fact, according to Kristina Cisnero, a contributor to Hootsuite, Google often uses postings on Twitter to discover new content. Because the amount of content posted online—either on blogs, social media platforms, websites, forums and more—each day is astronomical, Google is able to search Twitter to find content that’s getting a strong reaction from Internet users in order to speed up its ranking process.
While this can be helpful to know and understand as a business, it’s also worth mentioning that Twitter recently announced that it will be using an algorithm similar to Facebook to select which content to show you on your feed. This means that Twitter content that has performed well may show up more than content that’s being produced in real time. While you can opt out of this feature, it’s good to be aware of how this social platform may be changing if you use it frequently for marketing purposes.
Using Social Media to Propel Content
Although social signals may not directly affect SEO rankings, social media is a great tool that can be used to propel content your business has created, and having successful content does affect your rankings in search engines. By using these two marketing strategies in conjunction with one another, Lucinda Watrous, a contributor to SearchEngineJournal.com, shares that you have a better chance of creating “contagious content” that will give your content and your business more views than ever before. Just be sure you’re using solid social promotion practices to ensure you’re getting the best results possible with your content marketing efforts.
SEO and SMM really do have an effect on each other, even if that effect isn’t as direct as other optimization practices. Through proper collaboration and teamwork, these two departments can help your business soar. Use the tips mentioned above to get better use out of your social media marketing and more success with your SEO.
