Is It Possible For Social Media Marketing To Impact Your SEO?

Social media marketing is one of the most valuable forms of digital marketing today, but does it have any impact on your SEO? Is it worth focusing on or should you dedicate your time and attention to other areas? Here’s everything you need to know…

Does social media marketing impact your SEO?

It’s important to note that social media marketing (SMM) does not directly impact your SEO rankings. That said, it is an invaluable way to increase your overall brand exposure and online awareness – which invariably influences your SEO. It does this in 6 different ways:

1. Broader content distribution.
2. A longer lifespan on your posts.
3. Bolster your online visibility and ‘organic’ traffic.
4. Improve your overall brand recognition.
5. Boost your brand reputation.
6. Strengthens your local SEO.

So, while the posts shared across social media will not necessarily show up in the Google SERPs (search engine results pages), they will still generate social signals that indicate your posts are relevant and useful to your target audience.

Let’s say for example that you host and run city tours in New York, and you write a popular blog post about the top-rated tourist attractions in New York City. If that post is shared to social media and goes viral with tens of thousands of shares, there’s a good chance that your original blog post will be referenced and linked back to multiple times. This will accumulate social signals and may ultimately increase your content visibility and SEO ranking.

In other words, social media in this case, serves as the vehicle that will get your website’s blog post enough exposure to attract natural backlinks, which indirectly improves your SEO ranking.

So yes, social media and SEO does have a connection – if executed well and with intention.

What social media platforms are good for SEO?

There are 6 social media platforms that are particularly handy for SEO:

1. LinkedIn (powerful for B2B, and well-written LinkedIn articles do rank in SERPs).
2. Medium (they receive 154-million unique visitors a month).
3. Facebook (tap into the largest social media platform in the world).
4. Twitter (one of the easiest ways to get retweets and shares).
5. Pinterest (there are 600-million visual searches a month).
6. Quora (you can answer very specific questions, establishing your authority).

How to use social media to indirectly influence your SEO rankings?

Again, while social media does not directly impact your SEO rankings, it can be used to generate income and improve your SEO overall, especially when utilised with skill and intention. Here are some great examples of ‘best practices’ for social media marketing and SEO:

• Share high-quality content: quality over quantity every time. One powerful viral post is infinitely more valuable than ten-thousand weak and irrelevant posts.
• Encourage people to share your content and make it easy: your content should not only be of such a high-quality that people would want to share it – but it should also have all of the right elements to make sharing it effortless. Compelling calls to action and visible share buttons are an essentiality.
• Optimise your socials: all of your social profiles should be uniformed, clear, and concise. Tidy them up if you wish to attract the right people.
• Optimise your images for SEO: utilise imagery well and optimise for SEO. Little things like using the right file name, selecting the appropriate format, and adding compelling captions and alt tags can have a huge impact.
• Build active client/customer relationships: respond to comments, ask relevant questions, refer them to blogs they mind find useful, and create polls to build understanding. Social media is the perfect place to engage with your people on a human level.

Final thoughts

Ultimately, social media marketing and search engine optimization are two very important digital marketing methods that you should be focusing on. When executed well, both can complement one another wonderfully. It’s all about creating unique, engaging, and genuinely helpful content that your audience will want to share with their friends and followers.

If you are feeling overwhelmed and need a local digital marketing agency to help you outshine your competitors and make your mark, find a reputable New York City SEO company and you’ll be well on your way.