Can You Improve Your Site’s Search Engine Rankings With Social Media?

If you’re a business owner or website manager who’s been dabbling in social media for some time, you’ll know how useful it can be for building your online following by sharing news about your brand, running competitions or linking your followers to relevant content about in what’s happening your particular industry.

But did you know that you can also improve the search engine rankings of your brand through your social media channels? SEO has taken a turn as of late, and what are known as “social signals” are increasingly becoming more important to search results, as this NBC article highlights. This means that every share, re-tweet or comment your social content receives on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other platforms is another green flag to Google that you’re posting relevant and useful content for your readers – and that your website is worthy of appearing higher up in search results.

With 85 per cent of clicks going to organic results (i.e. results that aren’t ads), it’s imperative that your business is showing up prominently in those crucial first few spots, in order for potential customers to find you. (If you need an introduction to SEO and its importance, see our previous blog post on SEO.)

With this in mind, we’ve compiled a few tips to help you utilise your social channels effectively in order to improve your site’s SEO.

Write good content

This really can’t be said enough times, as it’s the golden rule for increasing your brand’s influence and reach online. Recently, Google has been placing greater and greater importance on serving up results based on the perceived quality of content by looking at things like how many times it’s been shared by readers. As such, every piece of content you put on the web should be in some way interesting, engaging, or entertaining to your target market.

So take those extra few minutes to read and re-read your content and ask yourself: Is this going to be something useful that my readers will want to share and engage with? Doing so will also help you position yourself as a thought-leader and authority figure within your industry – another important factor to consider when it comes to search engine results.

Integrate your site with social media

Just as important as writing good content is how easily sharable it is. If people love it, they’ll need to be able to share it. Make sure you have social sharing buttons seamlessly integrated into all areas of your website, but particularly on blog posts, articles, videos and other visual media you should be regularly creating.

Use social media to minimise your reliance on search engine traffic alone

Of course, if you’ve built up a strong social media following by regularly posting engaging content which gets people sharing and visiting your site, and making the most of a wide variety of social channels, you won’t need to rely on search engine results alone to get people to your site. There are now over 1 billion people on Facebook alone, and it makes sense to position your brand where these people already are.

So, whether you’re a fashion blogger or a large electronics retailer, there’s a huge opportunity when it comes to using social media to improve your search rankings, not just for Google, but for those you really want to connect with – people.