How Effective is Social Media for your SEO Strategy?

Back in the day, link building was the primary element for SEO.

However, with today’s rapidly evolving digital world, link building as the only SEO tactic just doesn’t seem enough to adequately bolster your campaign.

Google has been getting smarter and smarter at filtering high-quality content that consumers are interested in.

Undeniably, 2013 was a year with significant changes, teaching us a lot about content marketing and other creative strategies. Therefore, in order to stay ahead of the game, there is the need to incorporate different tactics to your campaigns to drive higher traffic and sales.

What can Social Media do for you?

It’s only in the last few years that more and more brands have started to utilise social media.

Although sometimes it can be hard to measure as a strategy, it’s very beneficial for brands to spread the word and reach out to different audiences through social communities, engage with them, and finally build relationships.

But social media can be more than just that.

Nowadays, social media is used in an effort to get the search engine’s attention by gaining high social shares and consumer engagement.

Did anyone ever say sharing is not caring, after all?

Social media has grown a lot and is still one of the top industry buzz words when it comes to discussing ranking factors.

There has been a lot of talk about branding when it comes to ranking in search, for example things like brand mentions and brand search volume for the brand are important factors.

And this is where social media fits in.

Social media is essential for brand-building, so whilst this may not directly impact SEO, the correlation itself seems to be affecting search.

The more your brand is talked about online, the more Google will see it as influential and rank it higher.

So the more you can get people engaging with your brand on social media and talking about you, the better!

How Google+ impacts Search

Google+ might not have been the most popular channel some years ago, but its popularity and use are growing more and more, especially since Google Plus is highly influencing rankings.

One of the major advantages of this social media channel is undeniably the vast number of different communities and circles there are. You can diversify your strategies by approaching different target audiences and connect to easily and in bulk.

Personalised search means that being active in these communities and having large volumes of people in your extended circles will make you rank higher in personalised results.

This is why it is highly important to connect with communities that match your niche.

A very good example of is National Geographic Google+. They have created a community called “Exploration” for people who share the same love for traveling, experiences and adventure.

Brands want to drive traffic in order to grow sales. But with SEO it’s not all about the position; part of the battle is having a quality snippet. This can massively impact the click through rate .

Having a good CTR is also a positive signal to Google as it shows that users want to click through to your site.

Google+ helps this by adding images and information to your snippet on certain queries, making you stand out from your competitors (this is assuming that you have connected your Google+ account to your website).

A good example of this is the Quicksprout study which found that adding information on your snippet makes CTR and traffic increase by up to 150%, showing that Google+ integration works. Google authorship not only helps to build relevance and build trust, but most importantly it can improve CTR.

Social Signals are important for Search

According to a study undertaken by Searchmetrics, another important effect of social media on your SEO strategy is that social signals show significant correlation with rankings.

However, in order to benefit from the social signals, you need to have something good to offer.

It’s all about the content which can sometimes, if you’re lucky, get a crazy number of links.

In this case, we are talking about viral content which can generate a huge number of links and therefore, gives the chance for the brand to rank very well and get exposure.

We all know that Google seems to be making sure that well-known, recognisable brands don’t have to undertake too many link-building strategies in order to appear high on SERPs which can seem unfair for the smaller businesses that have to put extra effort for relatively meagre results.

However, with cleverly planned out and executed campaigns, smaller businesses will be able to compete with the big boys.

To conclude, we would say that the best strategy to deploy is to integrate social media into your SEO approaches.

SEO helps in boosting traffic and sales, whilst social media is a valuable channel which gives the chance to reach out to your target audience and different niches, as well as building relationships with them.

It goes without saying that social media has increased its presence in our lives and many brands use it for their own benefit.

What do you think 2014 holds?

Are we going to see anything new revealed about the impact of social media on SEO?