Social media isn’t only a tool for businesses to connect with their customers and potential customers, it can be used to boost your website’s SEO too. An active, up-to-date and engaging social profile (or profiles) can demonstrate trustworthiness, boost visibility, and drive more organic traffic to your site.
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The Link Between 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, 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 Can Help With SEO
Build Your Audience
Social media sites allow you to reach an audience of people that might be interested in your product, but who haven’t yet discovered it. Facebook groups, subreddits, business accounts and hashtags are just some of the ways that you can connect with a target audience to share your content.
By growing your following, you build an audience of people who are interested in your product and who are more likely to buy when the time is right.
Content Research
Customers often engage more directly with socials, asking questions, discussing topics, and generally providing you with insightful information about their interests and pain points. This information can all be used to influence your SEO strategy and develop website content. Answer common questions on FAQ pages, write blogs on topics of interest, find out what other brands your audience likes and think about partnering up with them to expand your reach.
Boost Website Traffic
Not only can you build your audience on the platforms directly, you can encourage potential customers to click through to your site. The use of links in your bio and posts provide opportunities to send traffic directly to your site. Traffic, and user engagement on your site, are both ranking factors that will directly affect your position on search engines, which in turn can boost traffic further.
Generate Social Signals and Ranking Factors
Social signals are the engagement metrics of your socials: likes, blog shares, comments, views, and so on. They indicate to the social media platform that users like your content, and so the algorithm shares your posts with more people. Not only does that increase your visibility, it means that other users are more likely to click on a piece of content because their friends, colleagues and peers have shown an interest in it.
Ranking factors are signals that directly affect how well you rank in search. Though social signals aren’t a ranking factor, they can lead to increased website traffic and on-site engagement, which are ranking factors and can improve your search position.
Take Up More Space on Search
When someone uses Google, they see a list of websites relevant to their search. If only your website displays, then your competitors will take up all the other search space. However, profiles on social platforms such as LinkedIn and Facebook can also show up in relevant search results. When they do, you take up more space with your own brand and muscle out the competition.
The better your presence on social platforms, the more likely it is that they’ll show in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). If, for example, your website, LinkedIn page and TikTok profile all appear in the results for the same search phrase, you’ve tripled your chances of receiving a click-through compared to if only your website was visible.
Improve Brand Exposure
The more your brand is seen, the better known it becomes, and the more likely you are to make sales. By showing up on social platforms as well as your own website, you are likely to be seen by more people in more places.
Build Trust and Reputation
Potential customers will often seek out a company’s social platforms before its website, so make sure you have a presence in the places your audience is likely to be looking. On social sites, they can see whether you’re active (through regular posts), view what others are saying about you (through reviews and user comments), and get a more personal feel for your brand.
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.
The Best Social Media Platforms for SEO
There are hundreds of social media sites out there, many of which you won’t have heard of. You’re unlikely to want to be on all of them because of the time and effort it takes to maintain them all, but pick one or two that suit your business and focus on improving your presence on those select few.
Here are some of the best social media platforms to help with your SEO:
The world’s biggest social media site is great for sharing content, growing and engaging with an audience, and building trust.
The top business networking social media site. If you work in the arena of B2B, then LinkedIn is ideal. It’s also the top site for lead generation and popular with marketers. Use it to build a business network and demonstrate your expertise.
Instagram is a very visual platform that’s popular with creative industries and visual brands. Using relevant hashtags helps you connect with an audience that’s interested in similar topics, while making use of features such as reels and stories is a good way of grabbing the attention of a wider audience.
TikTok
Reach a younger target audience via short, engaging videos. Connect more personally with your audience and find more interested users through hashtags. TikTok is also now very popular as a search engine alternative, so leveraging that can really help if the platform demographic matches your target audience.
Used more like a search engine than a social media platform, Pinterest can have phenomenal results for your SEO. Using engaging images and descriptions enhanced with keywords can help users find your content. And, because most users on Pinterest aren’t looking for specific brands, you don’t have to always fight against the big players to be seen.
YouTube
As it’s owned by Google, you can be sure that any SEO optimisation on YouTube will be beneficial to your overall strategy. This site, where accounts share videos covering billions of topics, is visually appealing and engaging. Videos from the platform often show up in SERPs, and are regularly embedded in other sites, giving you an even wider reach.
Reddit has subreddits (groups) for almost every topic imaginable, so there is plenty of opportunity to find your niche(s) and conduct some content research. Be aware, though, that Reddit users are famously anti-marketing, so ensure you’re genuine in your engagement and not pushily selling your product. Instead, use the platform to engage with like-minded users.
Quora
Perfect for research – users come to Quora to get answers to their questions. Find relevant subjects and either show your expertise by providing helpful answers, or use the platform for content research.
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 next section and looking at some ways you can optimise your socials both to improve your website and to gain traffic directly to your socials.
Build a Complete Profile
A social profile is no good if you’re missing vital information, profile images, and content. It’s therefore important to fill out all the information that will help a user understand 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 and Share Quality Content
Like for all SEO content creation, producing relevant quality content is key. A profile that hasn’t posted anything in the last 6 months is, at best, 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 is 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 then be split into shorter snippets for TikTok. Or a potted version of a Facebook video could be expanded 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.
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.
Build Your Audience
While the size of your social media following won’t directly affect your SEO, a bigger audience means more opportunity for your content to be shared and engaged with. Make sure you’re attracting a following that’s useful to your business. Your aunt may be happy to like all of your posts, but she’s not necessarily your ideal customer!
Engage Your Audience and Build Relationships
On social platforms, you – unsurprisingly – need to be social. There are all sorts of ways to interact with your audience: 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.
Link To and From Socials
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, for example, will allow you to link to your other profiles.
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 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
As for any kind of SEO, the use of keywords is vital for good social SEO. Whether it’s your bio, business description, or individual posts, using relevant keywords can help users find you.
You will often find that a website keyword strategy can be applied directly to your social media sites. Pick one or two keywords relevant to your business and add them to social content. You can also use your research for social content ideas – what are people searching and can you create good social content around that?
Collect Reviews
Some social sites like Facebook and LinkedIn allow users to leave reviews and recommendations, which are always important to consumers who are making purchase decisions. Not only will good reviews help you build trust and demonstrate social proof, Google will sometimes show snippets of these in search results.
Find the Right Platform(s)
Getting good engagement will depend on finding the right platform(s). Before throwing yourself into social media marketing, make sure you’ve picked the platform with the right demographics. Because, no matter how good your content, if you’re sharing it with the wrong people, it won’t do you much good.
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 Instagram could be your best choice.
It’s also worthwhile getting to know what platforms offer in terms of posting options: you may find some opportunities you’ve never previously considered. For example, on LinkedIn you can 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. Trial everything and see what does and doesn’t work for your business.
Keep Branding Consistent
Google and other search engines track and link branded entities across the web. Ensuring your branding is consistent will not only allow search engines to better recognise your platforms, it helps users too. You don’t want a potential client left confused because they found you on Facebook then went to a website that has a completely different tone or style. Inconsistent branding reduces trust, whereas consistent branding improves it. And trust building is an important part of SEO.
Conclusion
Even though social presence is not a direct ranking factor for Google, your activity on the various platforms can increase organic traffic, improve trust, and encourage audience engagement – all of which are hugely beneficial to SEO. Utilise your chosen social platforms by engaging with your audience, creating relevant content, and building strong links between socials and your website.