5 Ways Social Media Influences SEO

Search engines are still the biggest source of traffic for any website or any other online platform. Search queries averaged 6 billion per day in 2013, and more than 80 percent of new traffic to a website came from search engines.

This is compelling data that should inspire webmasters and marketers to take advantage of search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to gain online visibility and profit from search engine traffic. One way they can achieve this is by making use of social networking sites.

Research shows that 7 out of the top 10 ranking signals come from the social web. The latest Google algorithm updates show that the search engine is refining its ranking factors to allow it to show more relevant and popular results to its users.

There is no better way to measure relevance than social media activity. Social media is considered the number one online activity and therefore social web signals are highly prized by search engines as an indicator of what people are talking about and searching for.

So how do social networks make SEO easier?

First of all, it helps in link building. When a brand’s content is shared on a social networking site, it gains a lot of visibility, and registered users of the social network become aware of the brand. In turn, this translates into link building opportunities. The number of backlinks to a site serves as a vote of confidence that demonstrates the relevance of a website. It is very important to always keep in mind that Google loves 100% natural links that are organically built by users.

Most importantly, content must be shareable through the placement of social buttons on web pages and blog posts. The presence of social buttons on a website leads to “social proof”, a psychology principle that states that people are influenced by other people to act in a particular way. For example, since most social buttons display the number of views and shares, the higher the consumption metrics, the higher the level of influence imposed on a reader to read a post or download a video.

Second, social media drives real traffic to a website. While links pass page rank to a site (and this is still very important), social media, on the other hand, draws a lot of traffic that is easier to convert because it comes from real people sharing content within. of their united communities. For example, an average user of a social network has 150 friends and this means that when this user shares the content of a brand, it immediately becomes visible to more than 22,500 people and if the sharing cycle is maintained, the reach of the content increases. exponentially.

Social sharing forms the basis of coveted word-of-mouth marketing in which peer-to-peer recommendations are widely accepted as a key influencer of user actions than paid ads. Peer recommendations have a trust rate of over 94%, while ads only achieve a 47% trust rate.

Thirdly, social networking sites help in optimizing the images. Search engine results pages show more and more images and Google’s Knowledge Graph is proof of this. Including keyword-optimized images in blog posts results in better visibility on results pages than posts without them.

Fourth, content that is gaining ground on social media through a high share rate is indexed faster in search engines. Indexing time can be reduced by more than 50% while reducing the time it takes for Googlebot to find content from 2 hours to 2 seconds.

According to Wikipedia, search engine indexing collects, analyzes, and stores data to facilitate quick and accurate information retrieval. When content is indexed fast, it means it’s found faster, and this is especially beneficial for content related to social events like a session of parliament or a seasonal topic like Valentine’s Day.

Fifth, social media platforms increase the visibility of keywords on search engine results pages. A social profile that has keywords, both branded and non-branded, included in the description and URL will show up when a user searches for those keywords, since search engines take name, URL, and bio into account.

If content shared on social media sites has similar keywords to those found on a brand’s website, it ranks higher due to the perceived relevance and authority of the keywords.

There is a great love relationship between social media sites and SEO, and content marketers looking to improve their visibility and increase daily traffic need to engage more on social media platforms.