In short, your social media posts and content don’t directly impact your website SEO, no. However, there are plenty of different ways that your social media profiles can impact your overall SEO efforts, especially if you’re posting regularly and have large followings because Google relies on SEO more than it will care to admit.
With this in mind, SEO agency, Slinky Digital had a close look at the different ways that social media influences SEO. The exact extent to which your social media will impact your SEO depends on your situation, but some of the things that it can do include:
Help You Distribute Your Content
Essentially, your SEO score is directly related to visitor behaviour on your website. So, it makes sense that posting your content to social media will impact your SEO score, to some extent at least.
To put things simply, posting your content to social media can help drive interested visitors to your website. Since people are only likely to click on social media links if they’re actually planning to read them, these people will likely spend some time on your website.
This should boost your visitor retention time, which will definitely have a positive impact on your SEO efforts.
Social Media Will Improve Your Online Visibility
One of the hardest parts of building a website is driving traffic to it. Using social media can help you rapidly boost your visitor numbers, especially if you can create viral content and build a strong social media following.
Using social media to share your content will also improve your online visibility and brand awareness. As more people find out about you and your website, you should see an increase in direct traffic, which will boost your SEO score.
Social Media Can Improve Your Brand Authority
Building a strong brand authority in your niche is a key component of SEO, especially if you’re running a small business. Developing a strong social media presence can help you do this by increasing your popularity.
Ultimately, increased brand authority will result in more natural backlinks to your website. In turn, this will result in improved SEO and a better search engine ranking.
Finally, Social Media Boost Local SEO
The final – and arguably the most important – way that social media can help your SEO efforts is by boosting your local SEO score. Make sure that you optimise your social media profiles by:
- Adding keyword-rich descriptions.
- Describing your services and service location carefully.
- Listing your opening hours and days.
- Adding a phone number and address.
It’s also very important to make sure that your social media details are consistent with the information presented on your website. If they’re not, you could find that Google and the other search engines actually penalise you.
Final Word
Although the content that you post on your social media pages won’t directly impact your SEO score, unlike having your main keywords in your domain or quality link building, there are still plenty of benefits associated with building a strong social media presence. For one, developing a strong social media following will help build your business profile, developing your online visibility and helping drive more traffic to your website.
So, I’d recommend starting to build a strong social media community if you already haven’t, posting regular content, and engaging with your followers – your SEO efforts will benefit from it!