3 Ways that Social Media Can Impact SEO
When we get to talking about social media and SEO, there are plenty of naysayers that say that social media activity doesn’t help your SEO. We’ll agree that there is no direct impact. Links shared in social media aren’t direct, followed links that send signals to the search engines. However, there are certainly ways that social media activity can improve SEO efforts in more indirect, but important, ways including the following:
Branding
SEO is all about building trust in the eyes of the search engines. Yet, the search engines are robots so what you really need to do is build trust among target audience members, others in the industry, and people in related industries in order to improve your brand reputation which results in inbound links (which the search engine robots see).
Being active in social media by sharing great content and interacting with others is going to grow your follower count and your brand reputation. It’s an opportunity to become known as a valuable resource which can in turn result in natural inbound links which are the best types of links to have. Social media activity can help to establish credibility and the more people that notice you in social media, the more likely you are to earn natural links on their web properties.
Relationships
Building relationships is a great way to build links, and there’s no better place online today to build relationships than within social media. Take the time to follow/like/connect with influencers and other industry professionals and get noticed by actually being social. Like their content, comment on it, retweet it, and share it.
Ideally, this will generate their attention and some natural links but once you establish a relationship there’s nothing wrong with asking for a link. Inquire about contributing to their blog or being included in a directory listing. Of course, if they outline linking rules on their website, be sure to follow them and determine whether you are even a good fit for a link.
Exposure
Writing great content and posting it on your company blog is a must for SEO today. But who’s seeing it? It will take time for it to rank organically and it may never crack page one of a search result if there’s a lot of competition for the targeted keywords.
Building up your social audience is a surefire way to get your content in front of people, which is really the first hurdle in getting it linked to. After all, if content is never seen it’s really hard for it to generate links. Consider investing in social advertising in order to boost exposure and target specific audiences so that you’re capturing people beyond your followers. As a bonus this is also an opportunity to gain more followers.
It’s true that simply posting to social media isn’t going to really impact your SEO. However, taking a strategic approach and investing in the medium is where the SEO gains will occur.
Categorized in: Social Media
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