SEO isn’t all about what’s happening on your website. In fact, some businesses don’t have a website at all and rely only on their social media to gain customers and connect with their audience. Even if reliance isn’t so heavy, most businesses will have an account on at least one of the most popular platforms, which include Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, X, YouTube and LinkedIn.
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Search and social media
Search and social media have a closely intertwined relationship and cross paths in various ways.
When searching Google for a business, you will often see search results for social media platforms as well as (or instead of) their own website. These results demonstrate that search engines pay attention to what’s going on in the world of social media, and that your activity there can affect your rankings.
Then you should consider the increasing use of certain social media platforms as search engines. Pinterest, YouTube and TikTok are all commonly used in favour of Google to find particular content, especially visual content.
In fact, there’s a strong indication that users prefer to search for a business directly on social media, rather than looking for a website. That’s reflected in buying behaviour too, with many users preferring to buy directly from socials rather than a website.
So, with social media playing such a big part in search, it’s important to optimise your accounts to complement the SEO work on your website.
How social media helps your website SEO
Though social media isn’t a Google Ranking Factor – which means it doesn’t directly influence your website’s position in search – it can have a lot of indirect influence. There are a number of ways good social SEO can help your website and business.
Take up search space: When a user searches Google, they see a list of relevant websites. If only your website displays, then your competitors will take up all the other search space. However, if your website and two social media sites show up in search, you take up more space with your own brand and muscle out the competition.
Boost organic (unpaid) traffic: Receiving lots of organic traffic to your website sends positive signals to Google, so the site is then likely to show higher up in the search results. Social is a great way of encouraging followers to click through to your website, therefore demonstrating engagement, boosting your organic traffic, and improving your search rankings.
Gain insights: Customers often engage more directly with socials, and will ask questions, discuss topics, and generally provide you insightful information about their interests and pain points. This information can all be used to influence your SEO strategy. Answer common questions on FAQ pages, write blogs on topics of interest, find out what other brands your audience likes and think about linking up with them to boost your marketing.
Demonstrate authority: Google loves an authoritative business that can demonstrate how their content follows E-E-A-T principles. Social is not only another place you can repurpose helpful and informative website content for a wider audience to view, it also allows you to further share your knowledge through direct conversation with your audience.
Social signals: These are the engagement metrics if your socials – likes, blog shares on socials, comments, views, and so on. Though they don’t directly affect your Google ranking, they can have a positive indirect effect by demonstrating business authority and user engagement.
Optimising social media for search
There are two sides to optimising social media for search: optimising the social platforms directly, and indirectly optimising your website through social media. These two approaches are unavoidably linked, so I’ll be covering them both in this article and looking at some ways you can optimise your socials both to improve your website and to gain traffic directly to your socials.
Create a complete profile
A social profile is no good if you’re missing vital information, profile images, and content. So it’s important that you fill out all the information that will help a user know who you are and find information they need. Make sure you use a good profile picture – either a business logo or a picture of yourself depending on your brand requirements – that’s clear and high quality.
Fill in basic information like contact details, your website, and a simple business description, and then expand on that by adding in as much additional useful information as possible. Depending on the social platform, you may be able to add features such as location, services, products, and other social media accounts.
Create regular, relevant content
Once you have your more static content in place, you need to make sure you post regular content. A profile that hasn’t posted anything in the last 6 months, at best, is stale and unengaging and, at worst, may make the business look as though it’s no longer operating.
Use keyword research to identify subjects of interest to your audience. You can also use the social platforms themselves to inspire content – what are your audience talking about? What questions are they asking? How can you create content to reflect interests and answer questions? What’s working and not working for your competitors? What kind of content does your audience interact with most?
Repurpose and reuse content
You don’t have to constantly churn out new material to keep your social platforms ticking. Look at the content you use on your website and other socials. Can it be reformatted and re-used on other platforms? A 1,000-word blog on your website could be recorded as a video for YouTube, which could it turn be split into shorter snippets for TikTok. Or a potted version of a Facebook video could be written into an article for your LinkedIn page.
Content can also be shared on the same platforms more than once. Because of the way algorithms work, your whole audience won’t see all of your content all the time. Sharing the same content on multiple occasions can improve your reach. Just make sure you leave some time in between shares, and consider adjusting the content slightly so it’s similar but not presented in exactly the same way.
Link to and from socials
Linking works both ways. You should, at an absolute minimum, link to all your active social profiles from your website, and include your website on your social profiles. Beyond that, look for other opportunities to link between platforms. Some social sites will allow you to link to your other profiles. If you make website content easy to share on socials – for example, through the use of a ‘share now’ button – users are more likely to distribute it and improve link numbers on your behalf.
Many social platforms will also allow you to include links to your website within your content. There’s a balance to be struck here, because links can reduce the reach of posts on some platforms. However, a link allows followers to explore your business further via your website, and helps increase organic traffic. Decide what’s best for your own marketing strategy and experiment with links and no links to see what works best for you.
Keyword research and implementation
Keyword research is an important part of SEO for your website, and it can be just as important for socials. Like you would for your website, pick one or two keywords relevant to your business and add them to social content such as your bio or business description. You can also use your research for social content ideas – what are people searching and can you create good social content around that?
Engage your audience and build relationships
Social media is called that because it’s somewhere to be social. That means you should be engaging with people as groups and as individuals. Respond to comments and messages, ask questions, and encourage conversation. By doing so, you’ll build brand loyalty and trust, make user experience better, and encourage even more engagement – all things that are a huge boost to SEO.
Add socials to creator bios
If you publish a lot of content on your website – like guides and blogs – then creating author bios is a good way of building trust and demonstrating authority. Include links to personal profiles (where possible), and you once again utilise socials for SEO. If your authors are active on their social platforms, discussing topics relevant to your business, they’re further demonstrating their own authority and passing those positive signals onto your site and its content.
Encourage employee advocacy
Your team engagement is an excellent – though often overlooked – source of social advocacy. Yes, it’s good when your customers talk about your business, but what about your staff? If they’re engaged and interacting with your business, they will share relevant social content on their own platforms, therefore boosting your company reach and – yet again – building trust.
Leverage platform functionality
Different platforms have different functions. Selecting your social media platforms will be a case of identifying where your customers spend time and also the type of content that you want to create. If you’re in the business of in-depth scientific articles, then TikTok probably isn’t the platform for you. If you have a lot of visually appealing products, then maybe Instagram is your best choice.
Platform functionality works the other way too. If you already have social platforms, explore what functionality they offer and then run some tests on what works best for your audience – what improves engagement? You may find some opportunities you’ve never previously considered. For example, LinkedIn is known primarily for its text and/or image content. But you can also share presentations, or engage users with a poll. On Facebook, it’s not all about creating content: you can also sell products directly from the site.
Find the right platform(s)
Getting good engagement will be affected by finding the right platform(s). Before throwing yourself into social media marketing, make sure you’ve found the platform with the right demographics. Because, no matter how good your content, if you’re sharing it with the wrong people, then it won’t do you much good.
Keep branding consistent
Google and other search engines track and link branded entities across the web. There’s a number of different ways they do this, but ensuring your branding is consistent will help link your various platforms together. This works for users too – you don’t want a potential client left confused because they found you on Facebook then went to a website that looks completely different. Inconsistent branding reduces trust, whereas consistent branding improves it. And building trust is a big part of SEO.
Conclusion
Social media plays a big role in SEO. Even though social presence is not a direct ranking factor for Google, your activity on the various platforms can improve organic traffic, increase trust, and encourage audience engagement – all of which are hugely beneficial to SEO. Utilise your platforms by speaking with your audience, creating relevant content, and building strong links between socials and your website.
