The SEO Component You’re Likely Missing

No SEO or web marketing campaign is complete without social media marketing. In fact, we are entering an age where SEO cannot succeed without a solid social media/content strategy in place with active online engagement.

Social media provides a great opportunity to engage with your audience and deliver value, information and positive brand messaging to an opt-in audience. On its own, it can drive a lot of traffic and revenue for businesses. But for best results, you always want to drive traffic to an optimized website. Not just search optimized, but user optimized as well.

Social media works best in tandem with your other online marketing efforts, just as much as your other online marketing efforts work best in tandem with social media marketing.

While search engines may not be using social shares as a ranking signal, we do know that when social media is done right, it often helps improve other signals that improve search engine rankings. [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=”@StoneyD”]Effective social media marketing and engagement boosts a number of signals that algorithms pay attention to.[/inlinetweet] So it’s not the social media marketing itself that helps improve rankings. It’s the results of good social media marketing that does.

Here are a few indirect ways that social media can impact your search engine rankings:

1. Link building: If you share quality content on social media and other reputable sources find it and link to it on their own website, that can give your site a boost in search rankings.
2. Brand recognition: Social media is a great tool for increasing brand recognition. And the more well recognized your brand is, the more likely people will be to search for it or to click on your result when it does come up in search.
3. Increased traffic: While you shouldn’t be using social media only to promote yourself, you will most likely be posting links back to your site. The increased traffic this brings to your site is a good signal to the search engines that your site is popular.
4. Increased search engine exposure: Your social network profiles themselves could show up in results. If someone clicks on your profile from a search result, they could click through to your website or to one of the links you have on that social network to your blog posts.

And remember, the algorithms are always changing. Just because social media activity doesn’t directly impact your rankings now doesn’t mean it won’t in the future. Now is the time to build your presence.

If you’re neglecting getting involved in social media, you’re tying one hand of your marketing efforts behind your back. Good SEO will take you so far. Social Media will help you the rest of the way.