In any kind of marketing, social media has always been important since it serves as a medium to reach a noticeable number of people that might be future customers. More than that, if various social media platforms are used effectively, one may easily build up a huge audience from a specific field or criteria. On the other hand, objective of SEO campaigns is to build up audience too, which is a kind of marketing as well. SEO and social media marketing have been serving as supplements for each other. More than that, social media has always been said to be crucial for various SEO strategies, here we discuss why!
Moving forward in the discussion, we are about to discuss how social media is important for SEO or how it actually affects SEO.
Importance of social media in SEO
When the field of online marketing was newly born, SEO was the only ruler in the field of website marketing. The primary factor in those old SEO marketing strategies was link building. However nowadays, link building cannot be used as the main SEO tactic since most of the major search engines including Google have figured out a way (let us say a much smarter way) to determine the popularity of a website that is “Social media”. It is a clear fact that your social media profile is crucial for your business popularity and search engine rakings as well since it directly represents your online presence. Despite of being difficult to measure, it is an impactful way of growing new businesses.
Before the involvement of social media marketing, measuring SEO strategy was quite simple. It was all about creating a number of back links and another number of content pages that represent your website. Those were most simple and static methods for grabbing attention of search engine robots. However, those days are gone now. One needs to change with time in order to last in competition. Social media came up with more dynamic and interactive ways of online marketing that surpass old / traditional SEO strategies easily. Following are some points indicating how social media platforms are important for various SEO strategies. Understanding these will make you realize how social media affects SEO:
- Involvement of Social Proofing in Link Building:
One who is well experience with various SEO strategies may certainly know that quality back links increase raking of the related website in search engine results. True that, but do you ever wondered why? In beginning Google allowed these links to determine the popularity of any website for their search results. The more links, the more popular and ultimately the better your website is. However, many SEO companies and website holders started creating such links manually (cheap indeed). To maintain their result quality in such scenario, Google made specific links more countable and others less. To come over these restrictions, SEO companies made websites that hold so called “best link listings”. Until now, Google had realized that there is no use of counting such links for result rankings. It ended up penalizing websites that had fake links. Most of penalized websites were those who paid various SEO websites for building up links for them, and this legacy still continues.
Ultimately, counting links as a measure of popularity was real good idea. However, it was very easy to manipulate these links in order to build fake audience and fake popularity. As a result, Google had to find a new measure that is cannot be faked or is real hard to do so. Various social media channels were a great option since it is real hard to build fake audience on these platforms. It clearly indicates that social proofing was always involved with SEO.
- Crowd sourcing the links with social media:
One who possesses a number of followers on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, he ultimately possesses a fan / audience base who will love to share his content in their circles. This is the main concept of social media. One can just write a new blog and share it on his / her social media feed. There would be a noticeable amount of followers who will share that content with other. There is a number of plug-ins available that allows adding social media buttons direct on your website. Using these buttons, you website visitors or blog readers can share your content on their social media accounts simply right away from your website. The more your content is buzzing around social media, the more popular and good you are for search engine robots.
It is certain that very few or none of your followers or people sharing your content will be your future customers. However, you are not seeking for customers on social media. Your objective should be to create buzz over social media to get the search engine bots know that your website is good, original and trustworthy so that it gets a good ranking in search result.
- Multiplying your online presence is made easy with social media:
In old SEO link building strategies, sign were created on various places (on the internet or say websites) that are pointing towards your website. However, only few of them were useful since others were created on a place which no one visits or where no one is interested in your niche. On the other social media are dynamic and interactive platform that are strongly connected to real time events. The only requirement of using social media as marketing equipment is that you need to be active and more active. If you keep up representing your business on social media, you can generate a noticeable audience that is interested in your ideas and shares your content. For this lock does not matters, all you require is consistency. Doing this will increase your business and website’s buzz on social media and eventually increase the value of your online presence over various online platforms.
- Google figures out everything through your social media profile and stats:
It is real tough to find a person that have not yet heard about various social media signals floating around the internet. Some people love it and some fake business profiles even hate it since they reflect the real popularity of your website and ultimately of your business. The fact is that activeness of your website is measured by Google through your social media channels. Various factors considered by most of the major search engines are:
- Frequency of content sharing
- How often your website and social media profile is visited
- The number of followers you possess on social media
- Are social sharing widgets are included on your website
Despite of worrying about how many backlink your website has, website owners now have to worry and concern about these elements in order to maintain their presence positive over the internet.
- Bringing in real traffic:
And the fact is that over 90 percent links created by various SEO companies and marketers are totally useless since they will never redirect a single customer towards your website. I am not saying that the method is too much of a waste, but the ratio is very less. Google soon realized it and categorized these links as a junk that contains such links or websites created for promotion purpose. This part of the web is ignored by most of the major search engine. Most of SEO marketers use websites that will never advantage your business and just boost you search results ranking or not even that. Paying such marketers is nothing but waste of time, money and reputation over internet.
On the other hand, various social media platforms possess the real potential of redirecting real and interested customers in to the business websites or at least in our social media circles so they are kept in touch every time we publish something new. So the point is, such people would either turn into your customers, or at least they would keep up with their service of content promoting.
- The ultimate conclusion: Google does not like Link Building:
The fact is: building back links would hurt your websites more than they will help you to build up sufficient audience. Maintaining that audience still remains a question. On the other hand, social media does not only allows you to build up audience but also helps in maintaining it by posting interesting stuff related to your business field or niche. Google strategy is clear as mirror about this issue since a number of websites are marked as garbage by it.
Reading these six importances of social media in SEO might have helped you very well in order to understand how crucial affects of social media are over SEO. Knowing this, you may also have understood that a proper social media and SEO strategy is required to be formed for your business in order to achieve your SEO marketing campaign goals without facing many problems. In order to from such special strategy, following would be a great help:
Social Media SEO Tips
- Optimizing content and profile:
There are a number of fundamental on-page SEO factors that can be applied only when setting up your profile on various social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. It is worth giving time for when filling you profile details up. Remember that every backend detail matters a lot if it is related to your business identity. Make sure to provide descriptive information regarding to your business identity, your locality, your activities and all other big-small backend registration details. When filling up these details, make sure to use keywords that are main focus of your website. Another strategy is including a physical address (original!) that will serve the purpose of local and mobile search.
In your social media SEO campaign, the content you publish directly on social media or the content you share from your website / blog to social media matters a lot. It will not only help you in building brand awareness but also in maintaining and building new consumer relationships. Traditional SEO strategies you are using such as search terms, phrases, and long-tail keyword strategies would be enhanced too.
- Creating buzz about your brand:
The real advantage of social media marketing is that you can simply turn huge audience into marketing affiliates whom you never need to pay. This method easily surpasses the methods of sales speech or advertisements. This audience is an easy opportunity who can make your content float flawlessly across the web throughout a wide range of social networks. Simple method of creating buzz on social media is to run activities that get maximum people involved and make them interact in what you are doing. Running promotional offers is also a great way of creating importances of social buzz with a little bit of investment. Increasing people’s interaction in your activities would earn your respect and trust in online communities and your business will firmly stand out as a trustworthy and reputed authority.
- Google+ has a great plus:
If you are reading these tips and strategies, you surely want to get Google’s algorithm fooled, or somehow pass it. If so, it is worth investing some time in checking the ins and outs of Google’s own social media channel. Follow the same strategy of optimizing profile and content while crafting your new Google+ profile. Fill it up with content that is rich with keywords and provide link that redirect back to your business website. Keep up with promoting your targeted content. Your consistency will eventually get you a bigger and expanding social media circle.
There are several advantages of having your business profile on Google+. Relevant online experience is delivered through responding to your own preferences, profiles and activities done by you on this social platform. Their content promotion feature and event engagement will create a separate avenue for your business promotions. Your brand name and image will be expanded as online presence of your business is boosted through referral sharing feature.
We hope this discussion gave you enough idea about the relations of social media marketing and SEO. However, this field is growing constantly as various affiliation methods are developed on daily basis. It is recommended joining a relevant community to keep you up to date with the latest information.