By Rachel Pitman on Thu 02 April 2015 in Marketing
So you’ve heard of SEO, and you’ve probably heard of social media. Why are they being mentioned in the same sentence you’re asking and what do they have to do with each other?
In fact, there is now such a cross over between social media and SEO that the term ‘Social SEO’ has been coined. Searchmetric's 2014 research shows that social signals are the 4th most highly correlated factor with search rankings. Here are a few ways social media can affect your SEO and what you can do to improve it.
- Boosts your authority
Google will rank your company higher if it sees you as a credible source. As well as considering how many people link back to you, Google is also now looking at your social media influence. An easy way to test your current social influence is by taking a look at your Kred score. A Kred score basically tells both you and Google how credible a social brand you have by measuring your activity and engagement on social media. You can check your score out here.
- Social Media results rank
Social media results are often some of the top ranked when searching for brand names. For example when searching for ‘ProspectSoft web clinics’ the 2nd and proceeding page of results displays each of the social media networks that we are active on. The 2nd result was our web clinic group on LinkedIn – an interesting finding. There is also a new feature that displays under your company summary on the right hand side of search results. This new feature displays some of your key social media sites with your latest posts – would you be able to take advantage of this extra feature?
- A new way of link building?
Link building has always been a key factor in SEO rankings. The main way links are created is by developing original content such as blogs and whitepapers. Sharing these links on social media can help search engines recognise you as credible as well as what key words you should be ranked for.
For example, say you tweet a link to one of your blogs and it is retweeted several times. Compared to a link that was never tweeted, it will have a much higher visibility in search engines since it is assumed to be a credible, valuable source as it has been shared on social networks.
What’s next?
Companies should expand their ideas of SEO to include ‘Social SEO’. Both social media and SEO are organic, inbound strategies that focus on building an attractive persona to appeal to visitors. As social media relies on quality content and a visible brand presence, the efforts you spend on SEO can further improve your social media reach, and as this blog has mentioned, your social media presence can significantly increase your search rankings.