Does social media contribute to Google rankings? This is an age-old debate in the SEO industry. The answer? It’s complicated!
Yes, social media is important for SEO – but not in the way most people believe. There is a common misconception that sites will achieve direct SEO benefits from posting on social media.
For example, when a post is created with a link back to your website, this is technically a backlink, however, the majority of social media links are ‘no follow’ links, meaning they won’t pass any ‘authority’ back to your site.
However, there have been studies to suggest that social media posting has many indirect benefits that will improve E.E.A.T. In this article, we outline exactly how social media can benefit your SEO efforts by contributing to E.E.A.T
E.E.A.T. stands for Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness. E.E.A.T was recently introduced into Google’s algorithm and is a core component of Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines.
In summary, Google encourages site owners to prove that the content on the site is valuable, and is created by a real person/business who has expertise – so users can trust what is written and have confidence in their next interactions.
One of these E.E.A.T factors is arguably the presence of social media channels. This is because most legitimate businesses will have some form of social media presence – so this is a big tick in the ‘trustworthiness’ box.
Posting on social media may give Google bots and crawlers an indication of the quality of your content through social signals. Simply put, Social signals are the likes, shares, retweets, reposts and views of social media posts. SEO professionals are still trying to figure out how social signals contribute to ranking but the consensus is – social likes, shares, and views signal to search engines that your posts and site content are useful or relevant, which in turn improves the rankings of your content.
The industry is torn on the matter as social signals can be very easy to manipulate and there is nothing to distinguish a Facebook like or a retweet from an account belonging to a real person, rather than a ‘fake’ or ‘purchased’ account. Until Google crawlers can tell the difference between a real social media interaction vs a purchased one – the jury is still out!
Despite the ongoing debate, the perceived SEO benefits of posting on social media far outweigh the cons (of which there aren’t many). So how exactly can you use social media to better your SEO efforts? We’ve listed 5 ways below.
Build a social fortress to build ‘trust’ – Matt Diggity, one of the worlds leading SEO experts, coined the term ‘social fortress’ which essentially means creating social media profiles to enhance the trust of your site.
He says “One of your main concerns as an SEO should be to increase the “trust” of your (or your client’s) sites. When a real business creates a website, one of the first things they do is brand themselves in the social media sphere by creating a company Facebook page, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. It’s a natural process of a website’s development.”
Add social media profile links to your site – Google will crawl these links and ‘see’ that your business has a social media presence which may contribute to improving E.E.A.T. Again, this is an exercise of building trustworthiness which indirectly will help your content to rank higher (provided it’s great content of course).
Continuous / automated post posting – any business that is serious about its ongoing SEO efforts will be creating helpful content that satisfies user queries and pain points.
Social media posting gives businesses an opportunity to distribute this content to get as many views as possible / help as many people as possible through the content. Automatically posting your content via social media creates additional exposure and helps your content to go further and be seen by a higher number of people.
Use social media to connect with influencers in your space – what better way to get additional eyes on your content than by connecting with influencers? Connecting with influencers in your space may lead to additional content shares which in turn leads to more opportunities for collaboration and backlinks.
If your website gets a link from a popular blog post or an influencer’s profile with lots of followers, this may send strong ‘social signals’ to search engines that you have high-quality content and deserve to rank higher.
Build links to your social media profiles – Matt Diggity experimented with building links to social media properties to see if this link authority is compounded and passed on to posts – creating higher authority. Matt reported that ‘after about 2.5 months of testing, the average SERP placement increased by about 14%.’
The principles above can be applied to improve organic visibility for both B2B and B2C businesses. However, the majority of social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter) are geared towards a B2C audience. B2C social media efforts have a much larger impact on organic traffic and visibility than B2B efforts.
Ryan Stewart, a leader in Ecommerce SEO released a video demonstrating real-life ways in which shoppers use Google to buy products, which has big implications for SEO and social media usage.
His argument was that users are more likely to browse social media first to find a product Instead of typing ‘buy chinos’ (for example). He or she will then ‘Google’ the brand name to search for reviews and evidence that the brand and website is a legitimate business before making a purchase.
This is just one example of how social media often drives branded traffic and how businesses should ensure they’re ranking well!
You can see this video here.
The five tips we’ve provided above should help you get started with reaping the SEO benefits of social media posting. In summary, social media is a great way to improve the perceived trustworthiness of your content, distribute your blog articles and make connections with influencers in your space which will all reap SEO benefits in the long run.
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