I had a recent discussion with one of the digital marketing agencies that I contract with and it was interesting to realize that the majority of their digital marketing contracts had a 70% focus on social media. You’ll be shocked to hear that only around 55% of these clients had email marketing implemented with most neglecting integration — it’s something that you could take advantage of when selling your digital services to companies.

But what makes social media so impactful on SEO? And yes, I do think that social is indeed the new SEO.

Social signals boosting search ranks

Imagine this, you have a blog post that goes viral on Twitter with tons of links pointing toward it. If your profile points to your website and you have yourself a viral post on your account, it lets Google and other search engines understand that your website is credible and should be ranked for your target keywords based in the industry mentioned in the post.

Bing has even admitted that they do “take into consideration how often a link has been tweeted or retweeted, as well as the authority of the Twitter users that share the link.”

Although Google says they don’t consider social media as part of their ranking algorithms, Google has admitted to crawling social websites for data which means that whatever data is available from social networks will be returned in the Google search results.

Social Media Profiles rank in Search Engines

The fact that you have social media profiles ranking in Search Engines (think Justin Beiber’s Instagram as one of the top searches when you Google his name), it must say a thing or two.

Your social profile influences the content of your search results which means that having a few active social channels can help boost your SEO and overall brand awareness.

Social platforms also act as search engines

The time has come where social media platforms are now search engines too. People don’t just go to Google to search for things anymore. They use Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook and so on.

It’s important to expand your SEO concept to social media platforms and not just traditional search engines.

Just because Google states that they don’t consider social signals to impact their search engine ranking algorithms, it doesn’t mean you should dismiss social media’s impact on SEO. Broaden your concept and build and foster your audience by spread into the social network while integrating it with your SEO practices.