There is little doubt that major search engines like Google are using social media as an important signal when it comes to search rankings. In fact, Google confirmed this way back in 2010 in a YouTube video. This is hardly surprising as people love sharing content on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter and the volume of content shared is huge considering that Facebook itself has over a billion active users.
Businesses neglecting social media cannot do so anymore as social media marketing is also an excellent way to build brand reputation and awareness. Most importantly, with the help of social media, you can not only divert a lot of web traffic to your websites, you can also help improve the rankings of your website.
Organic link building
There are many reasons why search engines are using social media signals to rank websites. In fact, social media has become an important ranking signal in the past few years. Firstly, social media marketing is a great way to build backlinks organically. Search engines love websites that build inbound links organically. When social media users share links online, it generates more backlinks to websites, which in itself is an important signal for search engines.
Companies must make sure to include links whenever they upload posts on social media platforms. As people share the posts, the number of inbound links also increases. Moreover, the quality of backlinks is more important to search engines than the quantity of backlinks. Links from social networking platforms are considered more relevant than other sources. This is because people share links on social media than the brands. People find the content interesting and share them meaning that they are personally endorsing the brand.
Often times, social media results show up at the top of search results – especially Google+ pages. You can even link your Google+ page to your blog and search results will even display your image next to the link to your content. Local search is becoming more and more important to businesses. It has been observed that local search SEO efforts can be boosted with the help of social media marketing.
Freshness
It is common knowledge that freshness is one of the most important signals to a search engine. Shares, retweets, tweets, likes and +1s act to improve the freshness of the content and search engines pick up on this. So the more people engage with your content on social media platforms, the more the freshness of your content, which can potentially increase the search engine ranking of your content – at least temporarily.
