This is an increasingly important question to ask, because indeed, social media is more and more so affecting the way your website ranks in search engines and thus giving all the more reason for businesses to adopt social media if they haven’t already.
Google’s algorithm is all about delivering the most relevant content to searchers. The way it determines how relevant your site is is based on a multitude of factors, from what keywords your site uses to how often it’s updated to how many links it has – and increasingly so, how many people are talking about it on social media.
Google knows that activity on social media is from real people and therefore must represent the real picture on how popular your website is.
The internet is full of spam and fraud. Signals from real people on social media mean more than a couple links from spammy websites. Social media is now the place Google can look to for unbiased and legitimate ‘signals’ to help it know how authoritative or popular your website is – and thus, where it should rank.
Social signals – these are links from social media to your website. So if your business is present on various social networks and shares a variety of content (such as your blog posts), your website might receive a lot of traffic from social media. This tells Google that people like and are interested in your content – and thus, Google wants to deliver more of your content to its searchers (rank better).
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of attempting to influence Google as much as possible to consider your website as highly relevant for your desired search terms. This has traditionally been done by strategically using keywords across the website and building links, but social media is playing a growing part.
Here’s the Proof:
Of course it depends on your target audience and which social networks are most relevant to that, but some of the main, critical ones we see are:
There is a plethora of other social networks out there, each with its own niche and audience. So part of the social media strategy we do for clients is identifying what networks they should be on.
Social media is not a trend and is growing rapidly. Likewise, Google is considering signals from social media more and more so when deciding how to rank websites. If you haven’t seen the value of social media yet for your business, you should now. Social media is a long-term commitment, and the sooner you start the sooner you’ll start seeing benefits.
Thanks for reading.
– Ryan