Social Media and SEO: How Social Media Supports SEO
The relationship between social media and SEO is nebulous but real. An active social presence will benefit your search rankings.
A high percentage of our clients come to us wanting to improve their search engine rankings. Many of them are surprised when we tell them social media supports SEO. Bottom line, you need both social media and SEO.
Gone are the days when adding a few keywords to your website equaled SEO. Now, the picture is a lot more nuanced. Where your business ranks on a search engine involves a combination of the following elements (among others):
Keywords
Although keywords aren’t the be-all, end-all, they still matter. Using keywords strategically can help ensure that search engines find your site when users are searching for particular terms.
Think specifically when coming up with your keyword strategy. It can be immensely useful to include long-tail search terms in your keyword strategy. For example, “skiing in Colorado with kids” vs. “skiing”: The longer keyword narrows down the user’s search to pages that contain the information they actually need. Because the long-tail keyword is more specific, your page might receive fewer overall hits, but those hits are more likely to convert into an action or a sale.
Quality content
Search engine algorithms are more sophisticated than they used to be. They now track user engagement and use other metrics to determine if content is not only relevant, but high-quality. High-quality content keeps users’ attention, provides deeper information and results in more desirable actions by the user (time spent on the page, number of pages visited, links clicked, etc.). This article sums up what should go into a page of high-quality content.
Social media
Social media’s relationship with search rankings is a bit nebulous, but this article highlights how Google in particular indexes social media sites and incorporates results into overall rankings. For one thing, an active social site helps legitimize a business for search engines (and for users):
“Mike’s site wasn’t showing up in Google results, because search engines didn’t know his brand existed. He had no social media profiles that proved the brand was legitimate.
The first thing I told Mike was that we should create some social profiles and regularly share valuable content. Coupled with a more search-friendly website and a Google My Business listing, these profiles would help search engines understand that Mike’s brand was more than just a TV show typo.”—Contently
In addition, the author brings up an excellent point about how search is no longer limited to search engines alone. When is the last time you looked up a restaurant on Yelp or Urbanspoon? Found a business on LinkedIn? Checked out a new music venue or band on Facebook? In a lot of cases, searches like these will bypass Google, Bing or Yahoo entirely.
“Last summer, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that his social network was already fielding 1.5 billion searches every day. By September 2015, Twitter was handling 2.1 billion searches per day.”—Contently
In short, an integrated approach to digital marketing and content marketing is more likely to impact your search rankings than focusing on SEO alone. Your online presence needs to extend far beyond the figurative walls of your website. If you are maintaining a website without updating its content, ignoring social media or failing to update a blog with high-quality, relevant content, you are missing out on several big pieces of the marketing and SEO puzzle.
Learn more about Campfire Digital’s integrated approach to digital marketing. We extend your marketing team’s reach through marketing strategy, high-quality content, social media, SEO and modern website design. Contact us for a free consultation today.