Updated: October 6, 2022
Our social media marketing course explains the importance of using social media in your SEO strategy!
We now know that many businesses and organisations use social media as a way of creating new relationships (with existing and new customers) and to share content.
You will also remember that social media can be used to signpost. That means businesses can use their presence on social media platforms to drive traffic to their own websites. There are lots of reasons why this is a good idea.
For a good start, using social media to point people to a website means there is only one website to maintain and keep updated. This is less resource-intensive than managing multiple websites and keeping content fresh.
At the same time, social media has an important role in improving a website’s performance in search engine results pages (SERPs). In fact, it is difficult to achieve page one positions unless you include social media as part of your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy.
Links to and from your content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube and other social networks help the search engines understand that your website is credible
How search engines work
Google lists credible, authoritative webpages first.
It decides whether a webpage is an authority on the topic, depending on its keywords and links and how they have been used. In other words, if the keywords are relevant to the topic and the webpage has been accessed repeatedly via other credible websites’ links (with respect to the topic), Google decides that the webpage must be a credible authority on the topic.
The more authoritative the post or webpage, the more highly it will be ranked and the closer it will get to the top of page one of the SERPs.
The more often this happens, the more of a reputation the webpage or post gets for being an authority, and the more credibility it gains with Google. This makes Google quickly list it at the top of SERPs in response to searches.
The first rule in using social media to help with your SERPs is to make sure you use the right keywords in your blog posts, Tweets, Retweets, Facebook updates, etc. Doing this helps Google to see how relevant your copy is to a searcher’s search terms, thereby improving the chances of it being listed highly on the SERPs.