Last week we look at 5 quick techniques that you can use to optimise for Google search. This week, we will look at social media and how your time spent on creating posts and sharing links on platforms like Facebook and Twitter contributes to higher ranking on Google search results page.
There are 3 ways social media is linked to SEO. Social media drives traffic and if your content is interesting enough, it will get people to share and therefore linking to it (Backlinks). The activities on social media itself like commenting, liking and sharing contribute to what we term social signals. There are research that shows that Google algorithms do look at such signals to decide if your page should be ranked higher. And lastly, you will most likely notice that tweets, posts on Google+ and LinkedIn profiles are showing up on searches. These are great ways to get more of your content out there boosting traffic, sharing and ultimately your ranking on Google search.
The jury is still out as to which of these contribute most to your search ranking but these shouldn’t be exclusive. If you are already spending time and investment into social media content marketing, all these 3 factors will be active in pushing your brand to the first page of Google search.
Let’s take a deeper look at these 3 approaches to SEO.
- Using social media to drive traffic and backlinks
Social media gives you scale, that much is clear. The more fans you have, the more people see and therefore share and link to your content. Of course we are assuming you have a good content strategy and understand your audience well. In our content marketing workshop we showcase a few techniques on creating great content that people what to read. Here are 2 quick tips; find out what people are searching for and the trending topics on Twitter.
For all these to work, you should probably look at some technical setup. Firstly, pay attend to your social media metadata. Including social media metadata in your content ensures that your reader get a good preview of what they are about to read. To do that you have update your page code with the relevant title, description, image tag and URL. This determines how the content appears across various platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
See here for a good example of an optimised metadata.
2. Using social media to boost your social signals
This one is straight forward. The more shares, likes and comments (engagement), the stronger the signal you are sending to Google that your page has good content and therefore deserves to be ranked higher. Of course you can scale that with good content and optimized metadata (see above) and having a larger following.
A word of caution; most people chase after fan base like it is the holy grail of marketing success. It is not. Unless you know what those fans can do for you, it is just another vanity KPI. Large fan base coupled with a good content strategy and a good understanding of how these can help drive traffic and SEO is the formula to success.
3. Use Twitter and Google+ for preferential search treatment
We know that Google gives preferential treatment to tweets and google+ posts. So the simple way to ensure your content get pick up by search is to make sure you take that extra steps to convert your content into something that works for Twitter and Google+. And yes, Google+ is a ghost town. Only a very niche and passionate group of supporters are still actively using that platform. Most folks just treat it as a content dump but that doesn’t mean that that little bit of edge it gives you is not welcome.
