Social media plays a unique role in your content ranking; without a social media presence, your company basically does not exist, but even with it, if you do not do it right, your content ranking will not be influenced. So what exactly is the role that this method of advertising plays? Let’s take a closer look at how the large search engines, like Google and Bing, look at your company’s social media presence and what you can do to make it better to influence your rankings.
One of the greatest ways that social media improves your content ranking is by the inbound links it provides your website. This might not be the case for every single social status that is shared on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, but those posts that go viral or are shared often, have a great chance at helping a website’s visibility and ranking. Take for example a link that you share on your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn that gets thousands of likes, shares, and retweets. While not every person that comes into contact with this piece of information will click on your link, many will and many will also use that link in their content, sharing it with their viewers. These are the quality inbound links that help your pages rank higher. This means that while the “likes” and “shares” might not have a direct impact on your ranking, they could affect it in an indirect way down the road.
What you share on social media might not directly impact your page’s SEO ranking, but it certainly helps it down the road. If you are not providing high-quality content, people are not going to like and/or follow your page. Without those followers, your links will not get shared, which means you have fewer inbound links coming to your website, which we talked about above. What you need to focus on with your social media campaigns is providing quality content for your followers that they not only want to read, but want to share in their own social media outlets as well as in various other areas on the internet that helps you to get the organic traffic necessary to help build your SEO rankings.
Social media is all about building relationships and the major search engines care about those relationships, whether they admit it or not. The more people that like your page and interact with it, the more likely it is that the major search engines will reward you favorably. Does this mean you need to respond to every comment and story shared on your business page? You probably should because it enables you to show the search engines that you have that meaningful relationship they are looking for in their high ranking customers. As an added benefit, relationship marketing never hurt anyone; remember those inbound links? This is where they start and how they increase over and over again.
The complicated relationship between social media and SEO rankings are continually changing, but the way that things have gone in the past, it is quite certain that social media will have an even greater impact in the future. SEO rankings are all about relationships and positive marketing, of which social media plays a very important role, whether good or bad. It is to your benefit to work on your social media strategy so that the search engines can see you building your relationship with your customers in a positive way, giving them a reason to rank your business higher.
