Do Social Media Really Matter Ranking in SEO?

Social Media is the current best way to keep an authentic connection with your audience. They are far more personal than web pages and provides the company’s personality in an instant and in a rather interesting way. Usually, people go to the social media services pages of a company when researching about it initially, to get a concrete gist of their work.  

Hence, the current customers are more likely to check out the Instagram or twitter of a company, instead of the website as it can be a cumbersome process. 

Well, it’s a Yes but not a simple one. To exemplify, read on a few ways to optimize the use of social media for lucrative leads.  

Getting back to business – does social media get weighed into search rankings?  

A Little Context

Google’s algorithm is highly safeguarded and unacquainted with the best marketing wizards around the world. And social signals have long been in the grey area when it comes to affecting the rankings. In 2010, Matt Cutts, former head of Google’s webspam team confirmed the fact that social signals are in fact a method for getting your rankings up. This matter completely dismayed marketers when in 2014 – answering a question, replied that due to the lack of possibility of crawling, the algorithm might treat social media like just another webpage but not a way to higher rankings.

Update Your Social Media

First and foremost, you need to update all your social media profiles. They need to have a consistent graphic and content language across all media, this is the key to effective brand recognition. If there are any duplicate accounts or pages, they need to be deleted. Keep a crisp and concise bio and put a relevant link for your visitors to check.

Make sure you ask these visitors to sign up or leave some contact because if they dropped by your social media, they probably know a little and want to know a little more.

Link it Up

Although social media doesn’t directly factor in SEO rankings, a well-managed social media is ripe with opportunities to get your links and content to a wider reach.

This makes everything on your social media – which is the content that is consumed better by the masses – an easy way of generating links for your business, which indeed does factor in better rankings. Because one needs to remember that social media is a search engine in itself.

In digital marketing guru Neil Patel’s blog, he mentions why it is important to keep the social media up to the market’s levels: “We need to understand that search engine optimization includes the search that happens on social media search engines.”

Be Active

Social media is a very fertile yet competitive place for businesses. Everyone is trying to catch the eye and is most certainly causing great competition, and the only way to sustain that is to be operating on the existing standards of activity. Do your research, know how to engage your content team to produce various kinds of media for different platforms at needed frequencies. In research by Cognitive SEO, there’s quite a lot to learn before creating your content.

Do know your limits too, it is important to build an online image – but it is very easy to ruin it too. For example, you need to stay in the correct range of posting; where posting multiple times on Twitter is cool, doing the same on Facebook isn’t.

Improve Engagement

Sometimes, when your social media works like a well-oiled machine, the rewards are better than anything because the maximum traffic lies there. As a part of your SEO optimization, you need to be present and engage the audience through whatever you put out there.

You can try these out:

1.      Focus on local marketing first. Attract local customers and influencers, to start a healthy relationship with your clients.

2.      Use influencers, when and where needed. The human validation goes a long way in leading sales and increasing traffic.

3.      Engage in replying, commenting, problem-solving on media. The first true verdict and questions often land on social media first.

4.      Don’t underestimate frequent activity, algorithms are often in favor of active content.

Stand Out

Social media no longer operates on the simple law of attraction anymore, share-ability is a huge contributor in getting pleasing analytics results.

When you create a distinguishable image online, the awareness, in turn, rewards in people clicking more on your website in search results. The magic of click rates is a sure shot way to climb up the list of a search.

For this, your digital marketing team or any digital marketing agency needs to cracking on the follows:

1.      Headlines that are relevant and catchy,

2.      Unique and eye-catching graphics.

3.      Hashtags that become viral

4.      Ask to be shared, retweeted, etc.

No one said never

Even though the folks at Google made it explicit that social media performance won’t have anything to do with the rankings, but given the edge, it gives to those who have learned to optimize it – missing out on honing it, will only result in cutting a loss to the competitors.

From the previous 2014 statement, the current verdict is that Twitter and Facebook verified content, does have an impact on visibility. And due to that, the current online scene completely leveled up to the same. Even if it doesn’t have a direct relation, the lack of trustworthy social media often throws off the incoming traffic.

Summing it up

Are social signals enough to bank on to fit into Google’s algorithm? Not yet. But is social media a huge SEO empowerment tool? 100% yes.

Instead of trying to crack the walls of the web search algorithm, focusing on the long term benefits of social media is the way to go about digital marketing right now. The web is all about making connections, building a clientele, gaining trust and increasing the range of audience. Social media has all of that encompassed in its functionality.

Social media does what a good digital media technique would do with a humane feel to it. Even if it doesn’t make the cuts on Google, it promotes your content in the best way, which is all SEO eventually is about.

For any business query, feel free to send us an email at shwetaj@bitwiseonline.com or call on +91 9879528311, we will get back to you as soon as possible.