Every marketer understands the important correlation between the use of social networks and SEO. Social media integration has become an essential part of every successful marketing campaign. What many may not understand is just how it builds SEO and helps pagerank as Google has repeatedly stated that social posts and shares are not actually ranking signals.
If this is the case and social media posting is not seen as a ranking signal, why bother integrating it with your SEO software? The important thing to learn here is that it builds SEO in other important ways that are ranking signals.
1. Increases Exposure
The main way that social networks boost SEO is by offering you a huge audience to target and expose content to. By frequently posting high-quality, interesting, and engaging content, you can easily get your message out to the people you want to see it and quickly build an even bigger audience.
Shares on social media stretch your advertising budget much further than any other means of advertising. More views and more shares mean more followers and so on. This is all great for SEO as it brings more traffic to your website and increases conversions.
2. Increases Brand Awareness and Content Promotion
The more people you get to your social pages and ultimately share your content, the more recognizable your brand will become. Simultaneously, as your brand becomes more recognizable and your followers and shares increase, you have more avenues for getting the content you publish using SEO software out to the public.
Brand awareness brings you more searches by brand; as your brand becomes more valued, it becomes more recognized by the search algorithm.
3. Encourages Link Building
Link building is still an essential factor in SEO. The more and better quality backlinks you can bring in, the more authority Google gives to your content. A great way to attract those backlinks is with social media integration. Followers, shares, and building audiences are all attractive to other websites looking to provide great content to their followers.
Many will link back to quality content shared by other brands in order to provide better service to their own followers. In this case, not only do you gain the benefits of a quality backlink but also exposure to even more viewers, many of whom may become new followers.
4. Google and Twitter
Although Google continuously claims that posts to social networks are not ranking signals, there is one thing that is certain whether due to ranking signals or not: Google picks up Tweets and ranks them in the SERPs. There does not seem to be any confirmed proof of this; however, Twitter posts show up at the top of the SERPs frequently. Whatever the association may be, it should be clear that Tweeting is good SEO for any brand trying to build audiences and get their content and name recognized.
Based on these findings, it is obvious that social media integration can indeed improve your SEO, just not in the commonly assumed way. Even though posts to social networks are not considered as ranking signals, posting does create a trickle-down momentum that increases other ranking signals. This is especially true with Twitter, as tweets often show up in the top of the SERPs.
To take advantage of this attention that Twitter gets from the search algorithm and improve SEO in other ways, marketers should make social media posting with their SEO software an essential part of their marketing campaigns!
