In this episode of 5 Business Rules, Monika Jansen and I discuss the correlation between social media and search engine rankings, with talk through 5 tips that you can use to improve your online visibility and brand exposure.
1. Content That Gets Shared a Lot Gets Seen a Lot
Back in 2014, Google’s Matt Cutts came out and said that social signals don’t necessarily lead to higher rankings. However, research from HubSpot and Hootsuite has shown that there is at least a correlation between the two, when content is shared a lot.
If your social posts are widely seen, you may see a boost in traffic with people coming to your website to read your blog – or even quoting your wicked awesome content! And that’s what Google wants to see – traffic that shows that your website is relevant.
In case you needed more motivation to create share-worthy content on social media, ranking Google is a pretty darn good reason.
2. Social Posts Drive Traffic
One of the goals of social media for many brands is to drive people back to their website. Something often accomplished through blogs or infographics.
This is good for SEO.
When Google sees a lot of traffic coming to your website, they can view you as a credible source – and then send even more traffic to your site.
3. Social Profiles Appear in Search Rankings
Newer businesses and newer websites that haven’t built up much credibility can take advantage of the fact that Google is likely to rank their social media profiles.
You can use your social media platforms to help people find your brand, and to discover your content. It pays to have multiple up-to-date profiles with plenty of relevant information about your business. Make sure to include contact information!
It’s also worth noting that Google does crawl social content, and so it’s possible that one of your tweets could actually show up in a list of search results.
Your social profiles matter just as much to Google as they do to people who are looking for you online.
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4. Featured in the Snippets
Content that goes viral not only ranks quicker, but Google just may decide to pull out a piece of your wisdom and feature it as a Snippet.
Snippets appear at the top of the search results page; they’re those little rectangles that highlight the best answer to a user’s query. Think of them as ‘position 0’ in the SERPs.
They’ll show people a good chunk of your blog post, and encourage them to click through to your website.
5. Social Media Content Gets Indexed Faster
As we mentioned earlier, your social media posts are crawled by search engine spiders. When those bots sees a whole lot of shares and clicks through to your website, they pay attention. Google is much likely to prioritize indexing your site, when there is activity around your blog post. That gives you a leg up in getting the content to appear in Google’s search results sooner than later.
Still have questions about correlation between social media and search engine rankings? Reach out; we’d be happy to help!
Every business wants to rank #1 in Google but you need to more than a wish to make it happen.
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