So, SEO and Social Media – your brand’s social media presence is fabulous – user engagement is up, you’re finally getting organic followers, and you’ve got pages and pages of amazing content. Great! Now, you think, “Wouldn’t it be great if that content could boost my SEO score, too?”
Oh, you hopeless romantic, you. Don’t you know? You should never marry your SEO and social media strategies.
But why?
It’s easy to see how your social media content can help improve your search engine rank: the content is online, and chances are, you probably used your target keywords, too.
Why, then, is it the case that social media content is largely overlooked by search engine algorithms?
Some of you might be thinking that things like privacy policies and encryption are actually what’s keeping social media from showing up in google searches. But the real reason is a lot more frivolous than you think.
Don’t worry, it’s not you: Google just says social media isn’t good enough for SEO anymore.
When Facebook was first becoming the digital powerhouse it is today, Google introduced its own social media platform – Google+. The idea was to integrate other Google products into one unified platform. But, for many reasons, it didn’t live up to Google’s expectations and was discontinued last year.
This effort, coupled with their acquisition of YouTube a few years prior, effectively made Google a social media competitor. As such, results from Facebook, Instagram, and other competing platforms are largely overlooked by Google’s search algorithms, assumedly in an effort to boost their own social media platforms.
However, Google+ is gone and their algorithm still seems to reject most social media content. And since that algorithm is perhaps the most complex in the world, that’s almost certainly what you call bad blood.
There are two big exceptions to this rule: YouTube and Twitter. Videos and tweets on these platforms will show up in search results on Google, and the reasons why are clear enough —
Google owns YouTube, and Twitter is a keyword-based platform.
So, if you were to, say, try to be sneaky and use YouTube and Twitter content to boost your SEO, you could technically do that!
It seems like a good idea, but unfortunately, there are some caveats.
First, Twitter is no place for B2B marketing, and it isn’t really a place where people go to learn about new products. So, any results you would get from Twitter content probably wouldn’t lead users to your website, let alone to the check-out page.
YouTube, on the other hand, is great for B2B marketing. But professional content production for YouTube is a major investment of time and resources that many smaller businesses can’t afford, all for a slight SEO boost.
As mentioned earlier, some of you might be thinking, “But every platform has dense privacy settings, wouldn’t that be what’s primarily responsible here? Plus, some platforms don’t even work outside of their own app!”
Indeed, things like privacy settings and encryption software do keep social media content from showing up on Google searches. However, such features most likely integrated into platforms with the grand goal of keeping that platform exclusive in the first place.
Sure, it helps that these are excellent user features, as well. But considering how competitive the marketplace is (and how long this rivalry has persisted…Google acquired YouTube in 2006), it should come as no surprise that platforms are vying to introduce features that entice users to stay on their platform longer than others. So, yes, these features do contribute to the issue at hand, but let’s not sit here and assume that such updates were rolled out purely for our sake.
Kind of makes you rethink the utility of these updates, huh?
On the most simple most fundamental level, social media is an acquisition channel that is meant to drive traffic to your website, and SEO is the same. SEO is another acquisition channel that is meant to drive quality traffic to your website, then if you have good CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) than that traffic should convert into a conversion, a lead, an appointment, a phone call, a sale etc….
So the question is how do you incorporate social media into an effective seo strategy?
You want to make sure that you understand what is the end goal of your social media strategy? Is it to get likes, comments, shares, brand engagement, video views? You want to consider the end goal in mind and all your efforts should generate this end result.
The easiest and most common strategy is to create social media posts with your website link in the bio or in each individual post and track the traffic from social media. This is the beginning of an effective social media strategy. Determining the end goal and tracking the results of your efforts. Combine this same philosophy with your seo strategy, drive traffic to your website and determine your conversion action and then track those actions and your on your way to the bank!
If there’s one thing you should take away from this post, it’s that social media is its own domain – but that doesn’t mean it can’t help your SEO.
Good social media content garners the most important thing in marketing: visibility. If your social media content is engaging, people will share it. The more your content refers back to your website, the higher the chance that you can gather critical SEO metrics such as impressions, traffic, and, of course, backlinks. Backlinks are the holy grail of SEO metrics. Google strongly values sites that are being linked to frequently.
If you need help rebuilding your beloved strategy, or if you’re ready to start seeing others, call your friends at Sack Lunch Agency. Our team is skilled in content creation, keyword optimization, and finding you the perfect match.
Let us know how we can help!
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