How Does Social Media Affect SEO?

[DemandZEN was recently featured on Awario, creator of cutting-edge social monitoring apps and home to some of the best internet marketing tools out there. A summary of the featured article, “How Does Social Media Affect SEO?” can be found below.]

If you’re a marketing professional, at some point you’ve either been asked this question or have wondered about it yourself:

      How does social media affect SEO?

You likely weren’t asked this last week. Maybe your boss posed this question years ago. How did you answer this? Was your response influenced by statistics, algorithms, and trends from the mid 2000s? A lot has changed in ten years, so the topic is worth revisiting.

Let’s get right to it. Search engine rankings aren’t directly affected by social media signals (likes, retweets, shares, follower counts, etc.). Indirectly, yes. Here are five ways in which social media impacts your SEO:

1. Social media brings more visitors to your website

If you’re sharing your (high quality) content on social media, you increase audience reach, engagement, and ultimately, visits to your website. This allows you to grow your website credibility while simultaneously building your social credibility. When search engines see positive trends in the quantity and frequency of site visits, it relays to them that your site content is high quality. Why else would people visit?

2. Social media boosts your SERP visibility

We’ve all noticed it. Social network links are appearing in search engine results more and more frequently. If you type an organization’s name into the search bar, any associated social media profiles pop up somewhere in the SERP (search engine results page).

3. Social media is great for link building

When you share content across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and the like, you’re exposing a wider audience to your brand/website. This results in more people engaging with your content (and linking to it from their own sites). What does this mean for you? Backlinks! For a deep-dive into backlinks, read this article.

Don’t underestimate linkless mentions, either. Thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) and an ever-evolving push by search engines to perfect their algorithms, sites like Google and Bing are getting smarter. Since real people don’t link to company websites each time they mention a business name on social media, search engines have adapted. They crawl articles, blogs, forums, comments, YouTube transcripts, testimonies, and social media platforms.

4. Social media helps with brand awareness

Your audience is on social media, so leverage that. Tap into social networks to boost awareness and target your exact audience: whether paid or organic, social media marketing is great for brand awareness. Done correctly, this increases the chance that people choose your organization in favor of similar ones (even if they’re ranked a few links higher than you on SERPs). Search engines see this favoritism and will boost your site’s ranking, thereby improving your SEO.

5. Social media platforms are search engines

People often turn to social media to search for recommendations, ask questions, and learn about organizations. As you’re using social media to improve your SEO, you’re also becoming more accessible to these people. Neil Patel has a great article about this.

For additional insight and to view the full article, “How Does Social Media Affect SEO?” on Awario’s blog, click here.