Too often, SEO consultants fail to consider how sharing your original content across channels like Twitter, G+ and LinkedIn can influence your site’s rankings in search results; but social media marketing can improve SEO and plays an important role in any comprehensive online marketing plan.
It’s an established fact that if you want to draw traffic to your website you need to offer useful (and hopefully engaging) content that will attract your target audience and provide the search engines with more robust information by which to assess your website’s value to searchers. Content is still king, but social media marketing is an extremely useful tool for distributing your content to the right people – that is, those most likely to be interested in your products or services.
Sharing your content on your social channels allows you to reach a much wider and yet more narrowly focused group; in other words, you can reach more people than you might normally expect to find your site through organic search, and those people would potentially be more primed for your message – more willing to buy, join, sign-up, call — based on demographics or subject interest information made available by the social networks.
Start by making sure your social media profiles are properly branded and optimized with photos and complete business information – and make sure you link back from your social profiles to your website and vice versa. Don’t ignore G+ when deciding which of the social networks work best for your business. Google loves G+ and activity on the platform (reviews, photos, etc.) can and does influence your search result rankings. Take the time to optimize your pages and share your original content on your profile regularly. Look for G+ Circles that relate to your business and share content within them.
Social media can be especially useful for building backlinks, one of the major factors that influence your SEO scores. Getting high-quality links to your site from authoritative websites isn’t easy; while you’re working on it, you might as well get your content shared across the social networks. Google has started paying closer attention to retweets, favorites, likes, +1s, etc., the idea being that if people are liking or retweeting the content you create, then it must be good stuff and therefore deserves a more prominent place in Google Search results.
Even if you don’t launch a major social media marketing campaign, a minimal amount of social media, applied with thought and consistency, can bring more than a few additional benefits.
Photo credit: Freedigitalphotos.net|Podpad
Great points. Thanks for clarifying the role of social media in SEO.