Does Social Media Impact SEO?
Search engine optimization is gaining popularity in recent years with more and more businesses adhering to this method for promoting their website. There are many ways for any service to market their website but most of them require you to spend quite a lot time. Also, a few of them do not even have a lasting effect. This is where SEO has an upper hand. It is not only very effective but its effects can be felt for a business for quite some time. It is cheaper compared to other methods of promotion. Like SEO, social media is widely used by various brands to promote their products and services online. This is obviously because brands get a good visibility as they stand higher chances of getting the attention of their target audience. Also information is circulated easily on social media compared to other places on the internet. Both of these methods are effective in their own way but is important for marketers to understand if they can work well as a co-related effort. There is always a doubt if social media really does affect SEO. This cannot be assumed about. There has to be some reasoning which will help confirm this.
The effectiveness of social media platforms for the SEO of a company can be validated with these three points.
- The biggest benefit of social media is that content can be shared quickly and across a wide target audience. It is extremely easy to spread information. When this sharing happens, the visibility of a page automatically goes up. It is viewed by content creators like bloggers, journalists or authors who further pass on the links in their piece of work. When your links get shared on pages with good credibility, it is bound to increase the number of visitors for your web page. This will lead to an improvement in the ranking of your website in search engine results. You can make optimum use of this process by trying to link with credibility content creators and sharing important content with them. These content creators serve as an indirect target audience to your business as they have the capability to bring in numerous potential customers to your website.
- The second point which has to be given a thought to is to try and find out the correlation between social media and user interaction signals. When a user searches for anything on the internet, there are a few links that appear. They click on a few of them and finally spend most of their time on the one page which provides them with the information they are looking for. Google tracks this and understands that the page they stayed on for a longer time has good quality, relevant content for that particular search. The same logic applies to social media. More number of likes, tweets, mentions or shares is an indication that people like the page which will increase its rankings.
Next, you should try to understand how Google+ activity directly affects rankings as the search results are personalized. All these factors are an indication that social media does have a positive impact on SEO if used well.
This article is written by Govind Agarwal. He is an Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing Expert at Submitedgeseo, with over 6 years’ experience in the Web Marketing Techniques.