SOCIAL MEDIA AND SEO: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SOCIAL AND SEO

The relationship between social media and SEO is nebulous but real. An active social presence will benefit your research rankings.

Social media and the high percentage of our customers want us to improve their search engine ranking. Many of them are surprised when we tell them that social media supports SEO. Overall, you need social media and SEO.

Gone are the days when adding a few keywords to your website matched SEO. Now the picture is much more nuanced. When your business ranks on a search engine involves a combination of the following (among others):

Keywords

Even if the keywords are not be-all, end-all, they are still important. Using keywords strategically can help ensure that search engines find your site when users search for particular terms.

Think specifically about your keyword strategy. It can be extremely useful to include long-term search terms in your keyword strategy. For example, “skiing in Colorado with children” versus “skiing”: the longer keyword reduces the user’s search to pages that contain the information they really need. Since the long-tail keyword is more specific, your page might receive fewer overall impacts, but these shots are more likely to convert into an action or a sale.

Quality Content

Search engine algorithms are more sophisticated than they used to be. They now follow user engagement and use other settings to determine if content is not only relevant but high quality. High-quality content attracts users’ attention, provides more in-depth information and results in more user-friendly actions (time spent on the page, number of pages visited, clicked links, etc.). This article summarizes what should be in a high quality content page.

Social Media

The relationship of social media with search rankings is a little nebulous, but this article highlights how Google specifically indexes social media sites and integrates the results into the overall ranking. On the one hand, an active social site helps to legitimize a company for search engines (and for users):

“Mike’s website does not appear in Google’s results because search engines did not know his brand existed. He did not have a social media profile that proved that the brand was legitimate.

The first thing I said to Mike was that we should create social profiles and share valuable content regularly. Coupled with a more user-friendly website and a Google My Business list, these profiles would help search engines understand that Mike’s brand was more than just a broadcast error. “- Content
In addition, the author raises an excellent point about how research is no longer limited to search engines. When is the last time you searched for a restaurant on Yelp or Urbanspoon? You found a company on LinkedIn? Have you checked out a new music venue or band on Facebook? In many cases, searches like these will bypass Google, Bing or Yahoo entirely.