Many people, including some who claim to be SEO experts, ignore social media when considering SEO strategies. They might see social media as a positive digital marketing tool, but they don’t get the connection between social media and SEO. There is an important connection, however, and it’s one you should be aware of if you want to improve your SEO efforts.

Put simply, social media can help SEO.

Therefore, you should consider social media marketing as part of your overall online strategy, but it should also form part of your SEO strategy.

Furthermore, if you get SEO services from a company in Auckland, you should make sure they understand the importance of social media to SEO.

Established in Research

The fact that social media helps with SEO has been established in many studies. An example is an experiment run by the social media management platform Hootsuite in 2018. It used blogs in the experiment, organising those blogs into three groups of 30.

• Control – these blogs were published to a website with no promotion on social media
• Organic social media – these blogs were published to a website and were shared organically on Twitter
• Paid Twitter – these blogs were published to a website, shared on Twitter organically, and also boosted for two days with a paid Twitter advertising campaign

The experiment ran for a month. It found the search visibility of the control group remained largely unchanged over that period.

For the blogs that were published organically to Twitter, search visibility improved by 12 percent.

For those that were published organically and then boosted with a paid promotion, the increase in search visibility was 22 percent.

But Google Says It Doesn’t Use Social Media as a Ranking Factor

It’s true that spokespeople for Google have repeatedly said its search algorithm doesn’t use social media as a ranking factor.

Why, then, are we going on about the positive impact that social media can have on SEO?

Google’s assertion that it doesn’t use social media as a ranking factor must be taken at face value. However, it doesn’t tell the full story.

The key to that full story is something that we know for sure is a Google ranking factor – links.

Here’s how it works:

• High-quality content will be popular on social media
• This popularity will lead to people engaging with your social media posts
• That engagement can include people linking to your content on their website
• Engagement on your social media posts can also include people sharing those posts, extending their social media reach to more and more people
• Those extra people may also decide to link to your website

We all know that backlinks are good for SEO. As you can see above, social media can be an effective tool for getting backlinks.

Final Thought: Quality and Audience Are Important

So, to recap, the fact Google doesn’t use social media as a ranking factor is not the point. The links you can get by people seeing your content on social media is what really matters.

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Crucial to this, however, is the quality of your content. You can’t just share anything on social media and hope for the best. Instead, you need high-quality content that people will be interested in.

You also need an audience, whether you build that audience organically or you pay for it using advertising.

When you have these two factors in place – a social media audience and high-quality content – social media can help SEO.