How Social Media can impact your SEO rankings
Social Media has a significant impact on search engine optimization (SEO). Search engine optimization has generated a lot of buzz throughout the years, especially in the digital marketing industry. We feel that many web users don't really understand what search engine optimization is and how social media marketing impacts it. In this brief article we will consider how SEO is impacted by SMM. The relationship between the two primarily has to do with establishing social media profiles, gaining social shares and leveraging high-authority social networks to establish quality backlinks.
Search engine optimization is defined as the process of affecting the visibility of a website or webpage in a search engine's organic results in order to get the site to appear more frequently and prominently to attract more visitors to the site. One reason why content marketing has become so popular in recent times is because backlinks are primarily achieved through creating original content and having it shared on social media. When links to your content are established across each of your social media platforms they serve as a guide for search engines to understand what websites are credible and should be ranked for specific keywords. A noteworthy consideration here is that this will help your company to be found based on its social media content due to the specific keywords that are used on each of your social media platform pages. This is extremely important for (business-to-business) B2B because it will help you to be found by and communicate with your target market. In addition, social media profiles generally rank well (often very high) in search engines. Each of the big social media platforms serve as authority sites that will often rank higher than a company’s own website. For example, our company's LinkedIn page is ranking higher than every page on our website and has even climbed above a competitor’s website.
We would also like to draw attention to one of the most effective and well optimized content publishing platforms of all time, Slideshare. Slideshare slideshows are extremely well optimized partially due to their affiliation with (being owned by) LinkedIn and the fact that every word and link on your slideshow will automatically be optimized for web searches. Slideshare is a platform in which you can establish your brand as a thought leader and authority around topics and keywords. In fact, we posted our social media strategy template on Slideshare a few days before we launched the company in order for it to rank in google searches and we were astonished to see it quickly rank second only to our company logo on google. In addition to its superb rankings, it was also viewed over 100 times within 3 days of it being posted! We sent out 6 Tweets which brought in a few views but after checking the analytics we realized that over 60% of the views on that Slideshare were from organic search traffic on google and yahoo. Slidehsare is gold for B2B!!
Another important factor to consider is that each social media platform is essentially a search engine. Many social media users are now searching social media for specific products or services. Oftentimes social networks provide more specific results than general search engines may provide. LinkedIn is the B2B connection hub and Slideshare has joined Youtube as B2B content hubs. In regards to the relationship between social media and SEO the most important thing is to establish a complete presence on each social media platform. This will help you to get found more often on search engines by your target audience.
In closing, remember that a B2B company seeking your products or services will likely search for your company online to view the search results. They may look at your website, and may turn back and view a few of your social media profiles to gauge your credibility. Use social media to make sure that what they see in the search results reflect well on your company and promote your brand. Contact us to find out efficient ways to leverage social media to do so.
Written by Andrew C. Belton
