The Relationship Between Social Media and SEO
There is very little documentation and a whole lot of individual trial and error knowledge that “defines” the relationship between social media and SEO. How can we get the engagement that we want out of social media while getting the maximum SEO benefits from your efforts? The answer is Social Listening.A social media listening/monitoring tool crawls the internet and social platforms and finds mentions of your brand/company/product/CEO or any other valuable keyword. It collects the found mentions in real time so that you can reply to or follow the author almost instantly. Examples of social media listening tools are Hootsuite, Mention, Keyhole and others can help a lot with streamlining the process. For mentions on social media and blogs, IFTTT is a powerful tool.Social listening is famously used tasks from improving customer service, increasing brand awareness, preventing social media crises, building the brand’s reputation online, and better market research.Google has clearly stated with Gary Illyes’ statement in 2016 that Google doesn’t take social mentions as a ranking factor. Social media does affect a number of SEO ranking factors in varying degrees of direct influence. Here are some of those possible social media relationships that can affect SEO:
Higher Web Traffic:
The most obvious result from a successful social media campaign is increased website traffic. Website traffic is an important SEO ranking factor. Social media can be utilized to increase curiosity about a product or brand and link to the answers on your website. Questions like “Have You Heard About The New Digital Campaigns at TIV Branding?” on social can drive traffic and reaction to them can be monitored by social listening tools.
Sentiment:
In 2017, Gary Illyes was quoted as saying that Google uses sentiment analysis for search rankings. Sentiment analysis most likely includes social media. Trends like favorable brand mentions, if the data is significant and helps to feed the E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness) ranking factor, has become a major factor in rankings.Most of the social listening tools feature a “sentiment” section in their dashboards to gauge the opinion of a brand by consumers online.
Link Building:
Social media is not only about engagement on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, but also about sending links that “a person would use” to blog posts or other website content. These links can be valuable as backlinks to Google.Social listening toots also find mentions of your brand on blogs, forums, news sites. These sites and platforms are already talking about your brand so they may be willing to help you to create links to your site and valuable information for their site visitors.In the world of SEO, the key to improved rankings is valuable and unique content that gives people the answers they want, and social media with substantial reach, discussion of brands, and the tone of the buzz that can be a wonderful research tool to guide content and content approaches. Stuck in a Long-Tailed Keyword research rut? Give social listening a try.