SEO and social may looks different at first glance. But in this social word they are tightly integrated. The social media popularity of a website will affect search engine ranking of a website. Google does not account social popularity when indexing and showing results on the search pages. But there are many other social features shown in the same Google search to provide better results to users.
Search engine optimization is not only optimizing your title, meta description and content. Improving the brand popularity, increasing the trust and reaching out the users quickly will also affect traffic to your site and in turns the SEO. In this article let us explore how social media can affect the SEO of your site.
5 Reasons Why You Should Combine SEO and Social Media
- Social media makes your brand popular
- Social profiles are shown in search results
- Rating and reviews increase trust of the users
- Social discussions and showcasing improve the SEO
- Social sites are search engines themselves
1. Make Your Brand Popular
The first step in entering into the social world is to have profiles on popular networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, etc. These profiles are the easy way for a new websites to grow the brand popularity.
Most of the webmasters are individual site owners without much investment plans. In this case it is impossible to rank top on search results for a new websites. It will take considerable time for your site to appear in searches and get traffic. Till that time, it is good idea to make use of the social networking to get the initial boost. Later once the site gets established, you will start getting the organic traffic gradually. By that time you will have a strong brand popularity with the help of social media sites.
2. Social Profiles are Shown in Searches
Google will show the results from Twitter and Facebook profiles on top of the search results. Below is how the Twitter tweets will look in Google:
Twitter Tweets Shown in Google Search
Especially when you have a niche site, more possibilities are there that Google will show your social feeds.
3. Ratings and Reviews
Remember, social is a very big world and not only Facebook and Twitter. There are many social sites like tripadvisor, YouTube, Google Maps, Wikipedia and other local classified sites. Results from all these sites are shown in Google search and directly impact the popularity of your site. The more popular your site is the more traffic it will get.
Let us take an example, search for “restaurants in texas city” in Google to find the results with map and reviews. Now that users mostly tend to click the result with good review which will directly improve your sales.
Google Maps in Search Results
4. Social Discussions and Showcasing
When you have large number of followers, they will try to like, share and clarify the questions on the social profiles. New users reading the responses will start trusting you since they will believe you are a real human. Establishing this trust is very important to run a site in long term and social media will help to do that for free.
Nowadays, you can’t see a website without having social sharing options and showing the like and shares. Having more followers, shares and likes are indications for high trust from users. Trusted users will spend more time on your site for reading the content or for purchasing items. This will improve the bounce rate of your site thus improving the SEO factor.
5. Social Media Sites are Search Engines
All social media sites are search engines themselves. For example, users tend to search videos within YouTube search and get the relevant videos. If you have a good video content, it will be an opportunity to link your site and get quality traffic.
Wrap Up…
The first page on Google search is always filled with relevant results from social sites. So social profiles for your site are much needed with good reputation and reviews. It is also a risky to only rely on Google to get traffic to your site. Having decent social followers will help you to get social traffic.
In future these social search engines may compete with Google search. In such case, strong social profiles will become part of the search engine optimization process by default.
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