How Social Media Marketing Turbocharges your SEO
If you’re a decision maker in your company, you’ve probably thought of “how leveraging social media can benefit my website?”. The part that needs to be understood is that there are a variety of ways that social media marketing can improve your SEO and overall online presence.
Factors such as piggy-backing websites with high domain authorities for high quality traffic and establishing clear user intent through back-linking and link building are prime examples of how social media supercharges your SEO.
The main question we’ll be answering today is, how do they relate? We can certainly establish the fact that there is a correlation, but it’s not all “black and white”.
Social media is indirectly correlated to SEO. This is because Google treats social media sites like any other website. The primary factor is that social media platforms act as a bridge between the content you share, the keywords you use and your website. Google, as of now, will only go as far as detecting incoming traffic from social platforms, this of course only works if your website has been indexed by Google.
Besides sharing content, lets not forget that website links within your profile page, across all platforms, is another way to get people redirected to your site as well as allowing Google’s Crawler to associate and bridge your website with your social media accounts.
However, the part that really needs to be understood, are the mechanics of SEO and what makes it “tick”.
Behold, the Google Crawler.
For quality digital marketers around the world, we can acknowledge that getting into the crawler’s good books can make or break your SEO campaign. Forming a fragile relationship with Google’s digital spider is never a guarantee as it gets updated regularly to be more sophisticated in order to understand relevance and quality across the web.
Which social media platforms should be considered?
What counts here is domain authority, meaning websites that are most trusted by Google’s search engine and carry the highest credibility. It’s a no-brainer to get listed on google platforms and subsidiary sites such as YouTube, simply because Google trusts its own platforms the most.
But there’s more! Let’s talk about legit prime real estate in the digital marketing world in regards to SEO. I call this the “Platinum 5”. They include Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and a “border-line” social media site, YouTube. It would only be fair to include the video-sharing site considering it’s social capabilities are not too far off from the rest.
These websites carry some of the highest domain authorities across the web and these are platforms where daily activity happen in the billions. So it only makes logical sense that Google would frequently crawl these websites.
The “Platinum 5”
As mentioned earlier, the “Platinum 5” are currently the most popular and preferred social media sites today. Collectively, they single handedly make up most of the internet’s traffic. Check out these graphs;
^This shows the overall organic traffic from Google since 2012 all the way up to 2019. From here, we know that Youtube takes 1st place, followed closely by facebook, twitter, instagram and linkedin cruising at 5th place. The combined traffic for all 5 platforms in just 7 years is a staggering 134,549,358,284 people or simply put, over 134 billion people in total!
^In the keywords department, YouTube takes top spot again, only losing its spot temporarily to Facebook in the middle of 2018 and then regaining top position followed by the “usual suspects” with twitter and LinkedIn following similar patterns and Instagram trailing behind.
One might ask the question though. How is it that YouTube, a “video-sharing site”, ranks no.1 in having the most keywords? Firstly, it’s because YouTube is a subsidiary of Google, and secondly, keywords and meta tags are a requirement when posting a video and therefore easier to crawl as opposed to other social media platforms which do not have a clear usage of keywords.
BUT! Keywords on your social media pages still count big time! Here’s quick proof of that.
Voila! The keywords used here are “phone repair” and a wild facebook URL appears. (By the way, this search was conducted in Malaysia so if you’re experimenting with this you’ll likely see different search results) In the description box, you can see where the keywords are placed, which in this case, is on their pinned post.
Facebook
Having a Facebook profile is highly advisable for SEO considering it has over 2 billion active users. More importantly, being able to use keywords in posts while sharing content to relevant Facebook groups provides value. When your content link is being clicked on and shared, Google’s crawler detects that as “relevant content” and will result in better organic ranking!
The boys from Google have been going back and forth since 2014 but have made it clear that the amount of facebook followers and likes does not play a part in organic Google rankings, but at the same time, having likes and followers does increase organic credibility for people to trust your content. So it’s always good practice to have quality content and followers to share it with.
The chart below illustrates the amount of keywords being crawled by Google on Facebook and the numbers below the chart (ie. Top 3, 4-10, 11-20 etc) displays the pages that Facebook’s URLs end up on.
In January 2017, Google has crawled over 60 million keywords on Facebook, and only a couple of thousand keywords made it to the Top 3 pages of Google’s SERP, while majority of Facebook’s URLs are found between the 21st and 50th page. For Google to know where the keyword comes from, Google has to anchor that specific keyword to a URL in order to identify its source. You’ll be seeing similar charts as you read so hopefully this makes sense!
Like other platforms, Facebook acts as a bridge between your website blog which you share, and the amount of engagement it receives, mostly with link clicks and keywords in highlighted posts. Even google analytics displays traffic coming in from social media and it's certainly for a reason.
Facebook and Instagram share the same platform since Instagram got acquired by Facebook in 2012. So it’s somewhat a mirrored approach. Even when doing ads on Facebook, Instagram is part and parcel of the Facebook ads ecosystem.
Where Instagram defers slightly is in the use of hashtags. This is also the primary element that sets Instagram apart from the rest. Although hashtags are also used on Facebook and more so on twitter, Instagram leverages hashtags with visual content.
For many companies, Instagram is seen as a lifestyle platform and has very little marketing value. It’s regularly viewed as a platform meant for selfie addicts and stalkers. Which begs the question of “How on earth does having an Instagram profile increase my ROI?”... My friend, you’ll be gobsmacked, because it certainly does have value.
Here’s a chart that shows instagram URLs finding its way into Google;
My forecast with Instagram is that it will only increase from here on out, seeing that there’s just slightly over 11 million related keywords.
In SEO land, if let's say your ad is a downloadable piece of content via insta-stories and have people clicking away to download free knowledge, that equals more SEO juice for your website but not forgetting keywords on your Instagram posts to back it up with! But take note that Instagram’s true powers are on mobile, not so much on desktop.
Linkedin, a subsidiary of Microsoft, is no stranger to industry professionals. Although the dynamics of LinkedIn are different to that of Facebook and Instagram, they share certain similarities. The similarities here are keywords in posts, sharing content and getting link clicks which direct users to your website. Many B2B companies see LinkedIn as the place to get quality leads, connecting with decision makers and really zooming in on their marketing efforts for maximum ROI, but more can be done.
By creating informative lead magnets to get professionals clicking in search of new knowledge would generate more traffic to your site, resulting in a SEO boost.
Although LinkedIn is primarily known for harvesting talents, it is also known for B2B advertising. Professionals that use this platform regularly, are always on the lookout for the latest trends in their industry. So if your company has something fresh to offer industry professionals, this is certainly the place to be!
Great, but how does this affect SEO? Similar to other social media platforms, if your LinkedIn account is busy posting material, sharing content and using accurate and objective keywords in posts, Google will get your Linkedin page in the top 100 and that's a guarantee. Do note that Google only selects your profiles from your most popular social media accounts to your least.
Here’s how relevant LinkedIn URLs are to Google;
That's roughly 30 million keywords making its way from Linkedin to Google and back. Certainly positive, especially for B2B companies!
Youtube
YouTube is the 2nd most visited site on planet Earth, just behind its parent company, Google itself!
And because it’s so massively popular, it’s also one of the harder platforms to master simply because videos are the only content format that’s accepted and there’s a lot that goes into creating a high quality video.
Many organisations acknowledge the power of YouTube but are reluctant in terms of investment and effort required to make quality videos. In some cases, production houses, producers, animators are required but this can easily break bank! However, if done right, YouTube could serve as your number one platform for SEO marketing.
In most cases, companies that want to test the waters would begin with straight-forward tutorials, as part of a series, by uploading weekly episodes. This is something that can be done with simple recording equipment and a video editing software.
The important question here is, what’s next? Firstly, there’s a SEO standard that your videos would need to adhere to. Some examples could include, usage of keywords in the meta description, hundreds of tags, appropriate video length for that type of content, back-links and keywords in the description box, shares on social media and so forth. The more of this, the higher chance of your YouTube profile showing on Google’s first page!
Check out Youtube’s URLs making its way to Google search;
Around 68% of YouTubers get redirected to an indexed website on google, which is the highest percentage of traffic generated from any social media platform being redirected from Google. That equals a sobering 216 million folks per month from all around the world. Let that sink in!
Now this one is a real no-brainer and probably the best place to start. Tweets are loved by many, even giant corporate news agencies use tweets to quote influencers on their thoughts or opinions on a subject. How about on the SEO front? Similar to other platforms, linking your content, using keywords “wisely” in your tweets, sharing it with your followers and having your followers share them too means more clicks connected to your keywords and more clicks tells Google that this content qualifies for SEO. Up you go!
Does having a million followers on twitter help with SEO? Directly, No. Indirectly, yes. Let’s not forget the reason that it takes a lot of people to engage with your content by clicking and sharing to begin with.
But here’s what Matt Cutts from Google has to say;
“As far as doing special specific work to say, you have this many followers on twitter or this many likes on facebook, to the best of my knowledge, we don’t currently have any signals like that in our web search ranking algorithms”
Below you can see a consistent increase of twitter URLs that have made its way into Google’s search results;
Twitter offers a decent amount of keywords but has somewhat stabilized. I can comfortably predict that twitter’s keyword relations making its way into google will remain under the 50 million mark.
If you haven’t already set up a twitter account, best get to it because time is of the essence! It’s super simple and super effective!
To Sum It Up.
As you can probably tell by now, social media plays a vital role in SEO. So it’s highly relevant to take into account the power of social media and the various ways Google bridges keywords, content shares and link clicks between social platforms. It’s also relevant to think about how traffic from various social media platforms can boost your search rankings on Google.
If you’re just starting out, best to jump start your SEO campaign with paid ads because using paid promotions almost doubles the SEO benefit compared to organic SEO. Since online marketing is generally a noisy place, there’s a good chance to rank better and faster with niche keyword phrases e.g. Instead of “software development”, use “custom software development in Bangsar”.
It’s important to remember to share content that is relevant to that particular social media site! You wouldn’t want to share content about latest practices in microchip computing on Facebook because that’s not what people normally look for on Facebook. You’re better off doing that on LinkedIn, for example.
After all, one of the sole purposes of the web is to enrich people with knowledge while keeping them informed of the latest trends in all areas of humanity by and large. So if that’s what you’re doing, then you’re on the right track!
Are you intrigued?
Drop me a message here to learn more.
