Social Media and SEO: How the 2 Work Together

Should you dedicate your marketing dollars towards SEO or social media?

The answer is yes. These two marketing practices have become closely intertwined. While it’s certainly possible to do one without the other, your chances of success are much lower. The experts at Google deploy around 500-600 code changes each year. These updates and tweaks to their algorithm aren’t just aimed at aiding consumers. They’re also used to level the playing field, making it possible for small businesses with high-quality marketing to win the game of search. To inform you, we’ve outlined some of biggest ways that social media affects your SEO ranking, and vice versa:

For additional insights, we recommend Integrating Social Media, SEO, and Local into One Winning Strategy.

Social Media Sends Signals

In the early days of SEO, the fastest way to build website authority was by building links. It didn’t really matter whether these were earned links or purchased links because Google struggled to tell the difference, which lead to loads of people gaming the system.

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In the past several years, Google has placed the power to rate content squarely in the hands of the one billion people worldwide who use social media actively. Every Facebook like, Tweet, Google+ one and other forms of “social signals” communicate to Google that both your link and domain are worthy of being shared. In fact, many researchers have found that social shares are more valuable than links when it comes to building your website authority, which is illustrated in the following graph:

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SEO Improves Your Social Presence

By fully-optimizing your company’s local social media profiles, you’re performing search engine optimization. You’re effectively increasing your ability for your Facebook and Google local pages to rank in search engines. Travis Bernard of Search Engine Journal reports that adding as many keywords and forms of contact information to your local profiles as possible will significantly improve visibility. The more insights you’re able to provide, the better you’ll rank in both search engines and for targeted searches on the network.

Additionally, it’s critical to remember that each of your social media posts is a form of content marketing that’s indexed by Google. By supporting links to your website with important keywords, you’ll assist Google in associating your business with these terms.

For more insights on Google Local, we recommend 5 Ways Social Media Builds Value for Your Local Business.

It’s all about the Customer Experience

While there’s clear benefit to your business in combining social media and SEO, it’s also critical to consider the human aspects of modern marketing. Ultimately, every platform your company develops a web presence on is part of your customer experience. It’s crucial to provide a high level of value to your prospects and customers, on the platforms where they perform product research and seek customer service. By investing in both web and social media SEO, you’ll be able to field the best-integrated and most-comprehensive customer experience yet.

Are you using both social media and SEO? Have you observed these two factors working together? Share your experiences in the comments!