Originally posted on: https://commonseoquestions.com/seo-and-social-media-marketing-what-are-they-and-how-do-they-impact-each-other/
Social media has become an essential part of our every day lives, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now more than ever, social media has become a must for digital marketing campaigns. A lot of businesses view social media and search engine optimization (SEO) as two separate marketing strategies, but in reality, social media can indirectly influence your businesses’ SEO ranking.
What is social media marketing?
Studies have shown that over 80% of consumers reported that social media significantly impacts their purchasing decisions, so it’s a no brainer for businesses to take advantage of the social media boom that has taken place in the past few years or so. By the beginning of 2022, there were 4.6 billion social media users worldwide, which is almost 60% of the entire word’s population and a 10% increase since the beginning of 2021.
Social media marketing is one of the main forms of digital marketing in which businesses utilize popular social media applications to build their brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic. Social media allows businesses to connect with their customers, creating a more authentic and personalized experience for them. Social media applications also offer purpose-built data analytics so that businesses can track the success of their marketing campaign and so they can identify more ways to engage with their customers.
Social media marketing is so powerful because of three core marketing areas: connection, interaction, and customer data. Before social media, businesses didn’t have a lot of great ways to connect with their consumers and other potential customers. With the invention of social media, businesses now have countless ways to connect and engage with their audience, ranging from content platforms to social sites to microblogging services.
Interactions on social media, although often passive, are a free way for businesses to take advantage of free advertising opportunities from electronic word-of-mouth. Existing and potential customers have the ability to interact with each other, hopefully creating a positive bandwagon movement. The fact that these interactions are happening online is extremely beneficial to businesses, as these interactions can be analyzed and are measurable.
The invaluable part of social media marketing is the fact that businesses can analyze customer data and use the feedback to make their marketing campaign more successful. With the data analytics offered by most social media applications, businesses can measure their social equity, which refers to the return on investment from these social media marketing campaigns.
What is search engine optimization (SEO)?
Search engine optimization, or SEO for short, is the process of improving your website to increase its visibility on search engines when people search for products or services related to your business. The better visibility your pages have in the search results, the more likely you will attract more customers to your business.
Search engines like Google and Bing use bots to crawl through pages on the internet that collect information about those pages in order to put them in an index. After this, algorithms will analyze the pages featured in the index to determine the order the pages should show up in the search results for a certain query.
SEO marketing is a subset of digital marketing that is 100% organic and free, as you can’t pay search engines to improve your website’s search rankings. In order to successfully use SEO to market your business, you will need to understand what factors these bots look for and the weight of each of these factors when it comes to index rankings.
Does social media influence SEO?
Although social media doesn’t directly impact your website’s search engine optimization, it does have an indirect influence on the factors that go into rankings. One of the major ranking factors that social media has influence over is traffic. Social media can affect your website’s traffic by getting more people to see your content. As more people share your content on social media, it will send more traffic to your website, therefore boosting your organic ranking.
In addition, your social media profiles aren’t just on social media- these profiles also rank in search engine results. By creating social media profiles for your brand and optimizing them, you can increase your rankings and drive more traffic to your website. Social media is also great at ensuring your content reaches a wide array of people. When searching for something on Google, the search results will be based on a relevant keyword that you entered into the search bar. On social media, your content is pushed in front of people who may have never searched something relevant to your business on Google, thus giving your business more exposure.
Social media also influences local SEO in many different ways. For example, you can often geo-tag your stories and posts on various social media platforms, which is a great way to gain more visibility with more local consumers. It is also important for Google to know that your business is credible, which is often proven by having a consistent name, address, and phone number for your business across all digital platforms. Having social media pages that feature your businesses’ name, address, and phone number can help boost your credulity in the eyes of the search engine bots, hopefully increasing your search engine ranking in the process.
Overall, social media will improve the reach of your content, especially if the content is high-quality. High-quality content will often result in high-quality traffic to your website, increasing its ranking. For some people, social media is actually replacing search engines. Most social media platforms have robust search functionalities, allowing people to discover new content through a social media search. By optimizing your social media pages and content with relevant keywords that have been proven to get clicks, your content can become more visible in social media search results, ultimately driving more clicks to your website.