Posting to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram 3-4 per week, updating your story on Snapchat and engaging in direct messages with your prospective clients are all great ways to increase your social media presence, but did you know that it could also be enhancing your SEO efforts as well.
There’s been much discussion about the impact that social media can have on your organic rankings, yet there’s been little confirmation from Google itself about the correlations.
But what we do know, is that engaging in social media activity on a regular basis can have a positive impact for your brand visibility – plus, there might be some nice side-effects as we explain below.
Here are some of the ways that your SEO strategy can benefit from social media marketing:
Your profiles can rank in Google
When you research a company, do you ever find that their Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook account comes up in the search results? Often, Twitter profiles and tweets show up as featured snippets, to give you an insight into the social activity for that business. For example, here is what showed up when we searched for “metro trains”:
As another example, here are the results when we searched for the business name for “Myer”:
When you get a high volume of search traffic to your social accounts, as well as strong engagement from your online community, Google factors in that it’s become an important page for your brand, hence why it can show up in the search results.
Target local results
If you want to focus on local “Melbourne” or suburb-based terms, then utilising social media to rank for these keywords can be very effective. When Google analyses your local SEO profile, it factors in a range of things such as local directories, customer review sites and in particular, social media platforms.
What this means is that you need to make sure that all the information in the business section of your social accounts is accurate and consistent with other platforms. In particular, there are three main pieces of information that Google will look for: Name, Address and Phone Number – otherwise known as NAP. By creating multiple social profiles and having the same data on each will help Google identify your company.
The result from consistent details across the web is that your business will have a better opportunity to land a coveted spot in the local map listings, or the organic position, for local terms.
Social media platforms are also search engines
Effectively, platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn act as search engines and rank a range of results, including profiles, posts, images and hashtags. It makes it difficult for users to know which result is the most legitimate. That’s why you need to ensure that your official account shows up the top by regularly posting, building a strong following and linking to and from your profile with various other resources.
By showing up, you’ll be able to garner more clicks through to your accounts, which could result in more conversions such as calls, website visits or direct foot traffic to your brick-and-mortar location.
Brand awareness = more clicks = organic rankings
With the huge number of people currently active on social media platforms in Australia – estimated at 15 million on Facebook, 9 million on Instagram and 4.5 million on Twitter as of May this year – there’s a wonderful opportunity to use your social media accounts to not only build brand awareness, but drive traffic directly to your website.
Posting regular blog articles and links to products or sales on your profiles, or just engaging in a general paid social advertising campaign, can have a great effect on your SEO efforts, as website traffic and the amount of time spent on your website are two critical rankings factors. Leveraging off a social audience to increase your website visits can result in a boost to your organic rankings.
The other factor is trust. By having seen your brand or engaged with you on social media, they are more likely to click on your website in search results than they would a brand they’ve never heard of before. With an ongoing increase in clicks and time spent on your site, you’ll continually improve your rankings.
Although there’s no clear-cut correlation between social media and SEO, it’s become evident that a by-product of a successful social strategy could be an enhancement to your organic strategy.
Are you keen to get started with social media, SEO or both? Get in touch with our Digital Strategists who can help set up a results-driven marketing strategy for your business.
