Do your social media activities affect the SEO for your website? No (not now). Google doesn’t rank your social media and then put this against your SEO, but social media content does get indexed (and thus directing traffic to your business indirectly), it does help build authority on the web and it reaches your customers.
It’s a bit of a grey area really, we know that Google and other search engines don’t rank or crawl your social media platforms, but what you do on social media can have a good or bad effect on your website ranking. It’s indirect of course, but there is a link. So Google won’t see a post that has a reach of 5,000 and boost your website, but it will crawl your posts on different platforms and see your growing authority online.
So why the blog post? If social media doesn’t really affect SEO? Because if you have a business with a website and social media presence, the two go very much hand in hand. By focusing on your social media strategy, you may enhance your SEO results.
Social Media Content is Indexed
Have you ever noticed social media results on Google? This is because Google does index social media posts, and depending on how relevant they are, they’ll show up in the search results.
See how our Facebook page is indexed here on page 1 of the search results, as well as two Tweets and a YouTube video? This is just a standard business name search, but if you’re writing blog pieces (like Social Media and SEO) that other users online may be searching for, and Google indexes, then hopefully you’ll grab their attention. Social media works here by sharing that content, directing traffic to the post and boosting its authority.
Which takes us onto building authority online…
We’ve blogged about authority before, and it’s still really important for search engines. The higher the authority of your site, the better. Social media can’t directly affect this authority ranking, but what it has helped us do is create a great network around the business. This network shares your blogs and information, creating more links to the site across the web. This comes into its own when you’re creating useful, shareable content – more people share it and blog about it, link to you and reach out. Google likes this.
Meeting Your Customers
Social media is undoubtedly the place where you meet your customers. Have you ever considered social media as a search engine though? How many times a day do you see someone ask for a recommendation for a service or product? How many people do you know only use Twitter or Facebook? You can hook them in there, and then direct them to your website. This increases the traffic, which increases the authority… can you see where we’re going? So for this reason, optimise your social media to the best it can be, in terms of informartion on your profile and quality content you post and share.
Because it isn’t such a clear cut relationship, we’ll keep this blog nice and short but there are other small elements which will boost both SEO and social media, just remember, Google may change its mind (and it isn’t the only search engine out there).