Social Media and SEO: Do social shares really matter for ranking?

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Social Media and SEO: Do social shares really matter for ranking?

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Yes, we agree that the internet today is flooded with lots of SEO strategies that can help brands and individuals alike boost their website rankings. In fact, website owners even have the luxury of sieving through this multiplicity of SEO options to find a list of the best SEO software to use for their website ranking efforts. However, one very effective SEO tool you wouldn’t find many websites or blogs talking about is social media. And that’s because many experts believe that promoting your content on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and the likes in an attempt to boost search engine rankings is a complete waste of time. Well, we really beg to differ!

Although the relationship between social media and SEO isn’t all clear cut, it still exists, and can even help you rank #1 if adopted properly.

In this post, we’ll share with you the relationship between SEO and social shares, and what you need to do to get higher search engine rankings from your social presence (brace yourself, it might not be as easy as you expect).

DO SEARCH ENGINES CONSIDER SOCIAL MEDIA AN SEO RANKING FACTOR?

Before delving into the discussion of how you can boost your website rankings with social media, it is imperative that we make some things clear. According to Google and some experts, social media is not a direct SEO ranking factor. End of story? Far from it! Although there are claims that social media is not a criterion for website rankings, there’s plenty of evidence that suggests otherwise. Contrary to what you might have heard, social signals such as likes, followers, shares, and links are all related to your ranking, somehow. To put this into a better perspective, when you go online to check those websites ranking on the first pages of search engine results in different industry niche, you’ll realize that these websites also boast the best, or at the very least, one of the best social presence of all the websites in that niche.

Now to the interesting part, did you know that Google is not even the only search engine platform available? According to a certain statistic by statista in 2019, it was discovered that while Google dominated the internet with 63% of US search queries, Bing (another search engine) had about 24%, which is a pretty respectable figure. While this might seem like an irrelevant info to you, it actually matters if you’re looking to convert your social presence to higher rankings. And that’s because social likes and shares are a direct ranking factor for Bing.

But if they’re not for Google, what’s up with that correlation, then? Let’s examine it closely.

Social presence and Google rankings: what is the connection?

If Google’s claim is anything to go by, correlation doesn’t mean causation, at least, directly. But what about indirectly? Now, this is the part that should get you excited. In simple terms, directly, social media doesn’t cause higher rankings on Google; but indirectly, it can amplify the ranking factors that Google does consider. 

When you use your social media platforms effectively, there is a great likelihood that people will link to you, network with you, tag with you, and follow your profile. Now, once you begin to generate this popularity on different social media platforms, it becomes easy for your content (most of which bears your brand or website) to get shared. After all, social media is built for mass sharing. The greater the shares, likes, and links you get, the greater your popularity on the platforms, and the greater the traffic to your website. Now, that’s how social media affects SEO because all of this sharing adds up to more visibility for your content. Practically, if you have a solid social presence, lots of people will share your content on different platforms, and when they do this, it is very likely that more people will link to it, and LINKS are a great factor in the world of Google SEO ranking. Now that we’ve established the relationship between SEO and social presence, let’s now take a quick look at some of the steps you can take to optimize your social shares, boost your visibility, attract more links, and rank higher.

• Optimize your social media profiles: if you have multiple accounts, be sure to make them all visual-friendly. Don’t just post “regular” content; instead, always go for the jaw-dropping contents.
• Post updates regularly: be the go-to guy for both existing and new audiences in your niche
• Optimize your website for social sharing
• Engage and amplify

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January 10, 2020 at 07:24AM