Does Social Media Affect SEO?

This is a question that a lot of my clients ask me ALL the time and I am sure this is a question you have asked before.

By now you know how social media has a positive impact on your business, but I want to zoom in on one of those benefits that can really ratchet up your leads and sales: SEO.

Even though social media signals don’t have a direct impact on search rankings, they affect your search engine optimization efforts in primarily four ways:

1. Increased online visibility and traffic to your website

2. Increased authority and brand recognition

3. Broader content distribution and longer content lifespan

4. Improved local SEO

However, the original question, “Does social media affect SEO?” should really be changed to, “How much of an effect are they having?” We know they make a difference. We know social signals matter.

Social media increases online visibility and supports SEO efforts to drive traffic to your website. For example, let’s say you have a conversion rate of 5 percent. If 200 people visit your site, that’s 10 leads. Bump it up to 500 visits, and suddenly you’ve got 25 leads. Of course, it isn’t really that simple, but you get the picture. The whole goal of marketing your business is to increase leads and sales. The more people that see your stuff, the more opportunities you have to convert them.

Studies like this one by HootSuite have suggested that there’s a correlation between social media shares and higher rankings.

While social media shares might be correlated with better rankings, that doesn’t mean that the social media shares cause better rankings.

A piece of your content could get shared thousands of times on Twitter without necessarily budging at all in Google’s search engine results.

Instead, when social media appears to be causing a boost in ranking, this is what’s happening:

1. Content that gets shared a lot get seen a lot.

2. Content that gets seen a lot is more likely to get linked to from other websites.

3. Those additional backlinks are the cause of the better rankings.

4. The improved rankings also lead to increased social media activity.

As AJ Kohn puts it, “It’s not the actual social activity that matters, but what happens as a result of that activity.”

What can you do to harness the power of social media?

1. Create content that’s worth linking to

2. Don’t try to build links on social media

3. Build (the right) social media following

If you want to harness the power of social media to – indirectly – help your SEO, try creating valuable and interesting content, building the right following on social media, and helping out your followers (without expecting anything immediately in return).

You’ll likely see that you naturally gain valuable backlinks – and that your content, and site as a whole, begin to rank better as a result.