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How Social Media Marketing Impacts SEO In 2020

If you’ve ever listened to or read anything said/written by an expert in search engine optimization, or SEO, then you know that social media can have a great effect on your SEO efforts. The term “Social Media SEO” has become very popular in the last few years. It is often used to describe the relationship between social media and how it impacts your SEO results. These types of conversations are becoming more frequent as marketers begin to discover the many ways in which social media content can help increase your website’s organic traffic through search engines.

Social media not only makes your SEO efforts impactful but also lucrative. How exactly? Well, the answer is complex. Social media plays an indirect part in your SEO because search engines don’t directly take into consideration any social signals. Sharing content on social media platforms, like Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest, doesn’t count as a ranking signal but increases your company’s exposure.

So, what’s the significance of this? Search Engine Results Pages, or SERPs, and social media affect your site ranking when website exposure increases. This exposure results in more website traffic which improves your ranking in SERP. Social media and search engines may have different purposes but their effects are overlapping. In other words, if you are investing in social media, then you are also helping your SEO efforts.

Search Engines Ignores Social Media Signals?

Does Google crawl social media pages and sites? Well, the answer is, yes, it does. Even though Google does look at social media content, it treats it like any other HTML page.

Google and search engines don’t take into account the number of followers and posts. The search engines know that if they took these numbers into account, then anyone could manipulate signals and ranks to dupe more deserving sites. So rather than taking into consideration your followers and post content. Google focuses on the amount of website traffic that is coming to your website for yours and other social media page, it’s called referral traffic.

Another reason the number of followers and posts aren’t taken into consideration is because social media is a bulk content service that changes regularly. No one actually knows how much data Google has access to from the “must-login” social media sites and if Google takes social signals for ranking signals because the sheer amount of content uploaded on Google 24/7 is too fast to keep track of.

Upping Your Social Media game

SEO is all about helping people find your website organically. Social media marketing is all about utilizing social media channels to help target audiences discover your brand and website organically.

Ask any digital marketer how to up your brand marketing game, and they’ll say SEO and social media. Any social media marketing plan involves a solid SEO plan to supplement it, and any SEO plan involves a solid social media marketing plan.

Social Content Indexing Opportunity

Publishing the right type of content regularly in your social media profiles will help you in your content marketing efforts. Social media content gets crawled by search engines and can get indexed, which is what you want.

Not all your posts will make it to the top of the search results page. Only relevant and specific content that a large number of people are looking gets ranked. Think about like this: If you are searching for Tom Hanks, you’ll get all his news and social media profiles at the top of the SERPs.

Social media gives more exposure to your website’s content. So, if you have a blog that’s been causing waves in social networks, then crawlers find it easily and quickly rank your content at the top of the results page, which is essentially why you see a viral social media post at the top of the SERPs.

Building Authority

Website authority is one of the key elements to consider and grows over time. Ask SEO experts and they will tell you search engines give a lot of weight to website authority. Search engines give you high authority when a page or domain has high value. This helps your site rank higher than other sites with lower authority.

The best way to boost web authority is to constantly publish relevant content. As you keep posting quality content, authority will grow because your website is proving valuable to visitors. This earns your website valuable backlinks that increase ranking points.

Before social media was there, backlink building for sites was completely different. You don’t need to worry about the olden days. Social media is responsible for building backlink profiles today because it is the biggest distributor of content.

If you have influence on social media networks, that will directly impact your website authority. How? Think of your social media profiles as bubbles composed of relevant and engaging content that pulls lures people in. The more engaging and relevant information floating in this bubble, the more people it will attract, which will ultimately have a positive impact on your web authority.

Real People Means Real Authority

SEO facilitates people’s web searches. It helps users discover relevant content with whatever they type in the search engines. SEO without the “user” in mind only makes the website suffer. Without relevant content, you risk a decrease in people visiting your website because it’s no longer relevant.

Social media is a big part of our lives now. Everyone is using social media and engaging on these platforms. Realize that these platforms are societies or communities of real people talking to each other and that you must provide them with the most relevant content in accordance to the platform they are using. If you do so, your social signal will boost your SEO. Social media is the easiest way to engage with a lot of people to increase your website authority.

And there you have it! This is how social media affects SEO. So, remember, social media is vital for exposure, branding and website rankings. Make sure you put in the proper effort on social media this year.