Over 60% of the entire world’s population is estimated to use social media in 2023, with around 90% of those users following at least one brand’s social profile. These statistics are staggering, but what do they mean for the social media or SEO marketer?
The relationship between SEO and social media is not immediately apparent, since most social media posts don’t directly influence your business’s search engine rankings. Yet this doesn’t mean that there isn’t a connection between the two.
Learning how social media and SEO work together is the first important step to creating a mutually beneficial framework in which SEO both informs and is informed by your social media presence – leading to enhanced brand awareness, increased click-through rates and, ultimately, a higher ranking on search engines like Bing, Google, Safari and Firefox.
Our beginner’s guide to how SEO and social media work together seeks to illustrate the importance of the relationship between these two seemingly independent facets of digital marketing, and to provide you with the tools required to further improve your business’s online visibility.
Contents
- SEO vs social media marketing: What’s the difference?
- Social media SEO: How SEO and social media work together
- 7 of the most beneficial impacts of social media marketing on SEO
- 1) Improved brand awareness and search demand
- 2) Increased click-throughs
- 3) Greater engagement, time on page, time on site, and improved bounce rate
- 4) Social media helps foster organic backlinking and link-building
- 5) Faster web page indexing
- 6) Social media interactions can inform and improve SEO content
- 7) Social media is a gold mine for keyword and target audience research
- The impact of SEO on social media marketing
- 5 strategies for successfully merging SEO and social media marketing
- Could working with a digital marketing agency benefit your business?
SEO vs social media marketing: What’s the difference?
SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, is the process of producing, structuring, and elevating content published on your website in adherence with guidelines from major search engines like Google. By optimising your website for search engines, you are aiming to flag each page as authoritative and relevant in the eyes of search engine algorithms, so that your pages are shown sooner and with greater regularity to target audiences with a specific query in mind.
SEO best practices include creating original, useful content, formatting it for accessibility, and encouraging other high-ranking sites to link back to your content.
Social media marketing takes place on social media platforms like X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. It refers to the process of developing and sharing content with the aim of attracting followers with an active interest in the services and/or goods your business provides. By attracting attention on social media through quality content, you can build greater international brand awareness and expand your market reach.
SEO best practices include auditing your site, creating original, entertaining and eye-catching content, partnering with influencers to extend your audience reach, and building healthy, informative relationships with your customers.
Both SEO and social media marketing have clear crossovers: applied correctly, they put your business’s online presence in front of potential customers effectively and consistently. But the question remains: how does social media marketing improve SEO?
Social media SEO: How SEO and social media work together
The answer is complex. Social media posts are not generally considered by search engine algorithms when assessing your site’s relevance or authority for SERPs ranking. Thus, social media doesn’t directly improve SEO. Regardless, however, there are myriad ways in which social media can be used to indirectly improve your rankings, and vice versa.
SEO and social media share a symbiotic relationship often underutilised by marketing teams. When developed in tandem, however, social media and SEO both complement and enhance each other.
7 of the most beneficial impacts of social media marketing on SEO
Let’s now explore seven key ways your business’s SEO can be elevated using social media.
1) Improved brand awareness and search demand
Social media marketing is all about branding. Platforms like X, Facebook and Instagram all offer unique channels through which to establish your brand online, visually, audibly, and with text. By creating unique and engaging branded content relevant to your target demographic, you can begin to create a loyal following of social media users as well as a strong brand identity which sticks in their minds.
Improving brand awareness and reach through social media marketing can then benefit SEO by generating greater search volume for keywords relevant to, and including, your brand. When a follower of your business – an ethical clothing company, let’s say – turns to Google to do some online clothes shopping, they are more likely to include your brand name in their search. Doing so improves your SEO by increasing the organic traffic and informing search algorithms that your brand’s landing pages are relevant to the topic in question – ethical clothing, to continue our example.
2) Increased click-throughs
Social media and search engine optimisation work together best when social media is used as a sounding board for your SEO work.
For example, you can test what kind of content, language, and formatting works best on your specific target audience via social media – charting the engagement each of your posts accrue in terms of comments, likes, and shares – and apply your findings to your metadata and SEO content production.
Search engine users are more likely to click on the link of a brand they already recognise from social media, and they are more likely to recognise that brand if your content, metadata, keywords and language are consistent across social and online platforms – leading to a higher click-through rate.
Note: Not all platforms may be suitable for sharing certain SEO content like blog posts and web pages.
3) Greater engagement, time on page, time on site, and improved bounce rate
The metrics by which search engines like Google assess your web pages for ranking include things like ‘time on page’, ‘time on site’, and ‘bounce rate’ – the latter being the percentage of users who leave your website without performing an action like clicking a link, subscribing to a newsletter, or making a purchase.
Social media can, when used effectively, drive more organic traffic to your site. Because this traffic is generated by people who have already come into contact with your brand and brand’s offering, the traffic is more likely to bring high quality engagement. This means spending more time on your pages and site as a whole, as well as ‘bouncing’ less often. Improving these metrics helps to improve your search engine rankings.
4) Social media helps foster organic backlinking and link-building
In addition to branding, social media marketers should be focusing on establishing positive relationships with content creators. For context, the global influencer marketing industry was recently valued at USD $21 billion, which gives some indication of just how profitable interactions with influencers can be for businesses small and large alike.
By producing quality, authoritative and engaging social media content, you can better encourage other content creators to reshare your work. Where creators and influencers run their own websites and blogs, their backlinks to your content will foster higher search engine credibility, thus improving your SEO. Social media influencer marketing can, in this context, be a much less strenuous path to effective link-building.
5) Faster web page indexing
SEO takes time to take effect, and new pages published to your website can suffer from a slow uptake where indexing is not actively encouraged. We recommend posting about, sharing, and linking to each newly published page. By redirecting your social media followers via clicks to your new web pages, you highlight to Google and other search algorithms that these pages should be crawled and indexed, or re-indexed, thus speeding up the SEO process.
6) Social media interactions can inform and improve SEO content
We’ve discussed the potential for social media insights to inform the structure of your SEO content (such as repeating successfully engaging titles and descriptions). But social media can also be used to generate new, more relevant and thus more click-worthy content angles.
‘Social listening’ is the practice of actively reading the comments sections on your posts, as well as engaging with your following via questions, polls, quizzes and AMAs (‘Ask Me Anything’s). By listening to your social media followers, you can identify common questions, issues, desires and concerns of theirs, and feed these back to your SEO team to be turned into targeted content more likely to attract click-throughs and appear higher in relevant searches.
7) Social media is a gold mine for keyword and target audience research
The lines between social media and SEO are blurring, as social media assumes the role once exclusively played by search engines. As users turn to Instagram, X, and YouTube to answer their questions, the value of these platforms for market research, including keyword research, soars.
Through social listening practices – such as using social platforms to find the goods and services you offer as though you were a customer – you can identify a wide range of high-quality long-tail keywords and market trends as and when they emerge. Feed these into your SEO practice and turn consumer discourse into actionable engagement.
The impact of SEO on social media marketing
As we highlighted in the introduction, the relationship between SEO and social media marketing is not one-sided. As much as social media can indirectly influence your search engine rankings, so too can SEO best practices improve your standing on social media.
SEO can inform a well-targeted social media content strategy
We explained above that social media platforms can be a gold mine of quality keywords for SEO content creation, but what about the other way around? Traditional avenues of SEO keyword research can yield equally valuable insights. Knowing what your target demographic is searching for via engines like Google can highlight market and branding niches you should seek to fill via the content you post on social media. This is a fantastic example of the symbiosis we mentioned earlier between these two fields of marketing.
Social media marketing is only improved with SEO best practices
A practicable way to think of SEO and social media is this: Anywhere you find a search box online, SEO practice is key. In other words, social media platforms like TikTok, Facebook and Instagram all apply similar algorithmic filters to the content their users share as Google does to web pages when assessing their relevance to a user’s search query.
You can use SEO best practices – such as keywords, language accessibility, structure and format – to enhance your social posts, boosting their chances of appearing to non-following users and followers. This then, if the steps described in this article are followed, feeds back into improving your SEO and SERPs ranking.
5 strategies for successfully merging SEO and social media marketing
We’ll close our article with a look at some of the additional behind-the-scenes best practices you can employ to create a blended social-SEO framework with which to improve your search engine rankings.
1) Optimise your social media profiles for search engine visibility
Though posts on most social media platforms (with the exception, for example, of X and LinkedIn) don’t tend to rank on SERPs, nor figure into search engine algorithms, your social media profiles very much do. Which is why it’s crucial that you optimise your profiles for search engine visibility.
Ensure that all of your social media profile landing pages are 100% complete, with all relevant information filled in to high SEO standards. Uniformity across your profiles, in terms of branding and language, is also important, helping to inform search engine trawlers that your business is trustworthy and legitimate, thus increasing click-throughs and conversions.
2) Leverage your combined social media and SEO strategy to extend content lifespan
Both social media marketing and SEO rely heavily on the creation of high-quality, relevant, optimised content – meaning content which is easily navigable and links through to your website’s most relevant pages. The positive impact of most content on SEO, however, only lasts for a certain period of time – usually the length of time that the content is relevant (i.e., a post about Summer fashion becomes quickly outdated).
However, you can extend both the lifespan of your SEO content and the engagement it garners by resharing it to your audience via social media. This can be done in tandem with the release of the content on your website, but could – using the example above – be done much later; e.g., resharing that Summer fashion blog next year.
3) Ensure that your SEO teams and social media teams work together
On of the most important takeaways from this article must be the interconnectivity of social media and SEO. One can inform the other to the benefit of your business’s online presence, but only in situations where the two are used symbiotically.
An easy and effective way to ensure this symbiosis is to have your SEO and social media teams work together, or even as one unit. For example, the SEO team can inform your social media content strategy with keywords and best practices, and in return your social media team can relay which posts are garnering the most engagement, whilst backlinking to your SEO content.
4) Optimise your SEO content for social media sharing
One of the simplest ways to encourage more clicks, increased engagement and conversions from your SEO content is to make it shareable via social media. This way, the content not only accrues SEO traffic, but also organic traffic from users exposed to snippets of the content – including your branding – in their social media feeds.
Whenever you post blogs, videos, articles or presentations, be sure to create action buttons which allow users to easily share the content to their own social profile(s). These buttons can either serve as a link to the content as a whole, and/or as a means to quickly embed or quote a portion of the content in a post the user wishes to make.
At its best, optimising your SEO content for social media sharing encourages UGC (user-generated content) which features and links back to your brand’s website.
5) Cross-promotion is key
And speaking of sharing, cross-promotion of social media and SEO content is the final tip we have for you. By reaching the widest audience possible, you improve your brand awareness, as well as the chances of higher click-throughs, lower bounce rates, and more conversions.
Cross-promotion is the key to reaching a wide audience. Make sure to repost SEO content from your site on your social media channels, as well as the content from one social media channel across all of the platforms your business is active on.
Could working with a digital marketing agency benefit your business?
The potential benefits of pairing SEO with social media marketing are limitless. Increased brand awareness, higher SERPs rankings, better click-through rates and a greater number of conversions can have real-world financial impacts on your business, helping you to grow and stabilise.
Yet the work required to keep on top of both SEO and social media is undeniably great. Not many businesses have the resources or time to dedicate to developing a winning social-SEO strategy, and even those that do may find themselves in too deep to make the most of it.
By working with a dedicated digital marketing agency like the ‘busy bees’ at beefound.agency, you can be sure that your business’s online presence is in the hands of experts, more than capable of delivering on your SEO goals. Take the first steps toward boosting your business’s social media standing and search engine ranking by browsing beefound.agency’s services, today.
