Social media can be one of the most effective ways to build your brand, general leads, and showcase your expertise to a large audience. When used, correctly, social media can help small businesses generate revenue and grow their business. Still, many small businesses owners haven’t embraced social media completely. Some say it’s too time-consuming while others feel they simply aren’t getting enough out of what they’re putting into social platforms. They want more than the hope of getting more leads and more business; something that’s more of a guarantee. Several ask, does social media help SEO?

Yes, social media helps SEO

Questions asked and answered! If you want to know how social media helps SEO, here are some facts to consider. Econsultancy’s State of Search Marketing Report 2013 stated that 74% of companies and 82% of agencies surveyed said that social media is either somewhat or highly integrated into their SEO strategy. Some benefits are obvious, some are more subjective. There are more definitive ways that social media helps SEO. Here is an overview of each.

Social media helps branded searches

One way that having a presence on social platforms can help your SEO is by boosting your branded searches. What are those? a branded search is any query via a search engine (like Google) that includes the name of your company, business or brand. If you have at least one active social profile, you could probably Google your company name now and see for yourself. Most of the time, you’ll see the big platforms rank: Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter but you may also see Instagram, Yelp, Pinterest or other platforms. All those positions in the SERPS gives your brand more exposure, which is a good thing!

Social media helps with keyword rankings

This statement is debated among SEO professionals, but Hootsuite did an in-depth experiment on SEO and social media and found that there is a there is a strong correlation between the number of websites pointing to a piece of content and relative rank. Search Engine Journal had come to a similar conclusion in 2017; again stating a strong correlation but no definitive proof of causation.

Social media helps build links

It’s a pretty basic fact: the more shares on social media you have, the more opportunities people have to see your content and link to it. What’s the best way to get your great content out in front of many people? Social media! Of course, your content needs to be worth linking to; it’s not a guarantee. However, if you make high-quality content that gains traction on social media, you’re more likely to get links from other websites.

Social media helps with social signals

Social signals are interaction metrics on social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, Medium, etc. Some examples of social signals include likes, dislikes, shares, votes, pins, views, etc. which commonly help to showcase popularity of a specific piece of content. These activities contribute to a page’s organic search ranking and are seen as another form of citation, similar to backlinks. Google is definitely measuring your website’s “pulse rate” on social media channels.

Social links bring real traffic to your website

Social links have a real potential to bring real people into your website and into your social followers or social circles. This means at some point these people could very well turn into a customer or a content promoter for your business. Social media drives traffic to your site, which helps your SEO overall.

Optimizing your social media for SEO

With the benefit of social media to SEO illustrated, it’s time to take a look at your social efforts to make sure you’re doing all you can to benefit from an SEO standpoint. Here are a few tips:

Optimize your social profiles for keyword phrases

Include an engaging bio that will encourage people to interact with your profile

Add a link to your bio to your website

Post regularly with relevant, interesting content that people will read and share. Invest in your content marketing!

Optimize your website content for social sharing, including great headlines, share buttons and fantastic content

Actively engage on your platforms consistently

Now that you know the answer to “will social media help SEO?” take advantage of your social platforms and improve your SEO!