Is social media marketing good for SEO? Yes it is. While Google may not directly take signals from your social media accounts, your social activity has many indirect effects on your SEO efforts and it can have an incredible ROI. Here is a closer look at how your social media marketing impacts SEO:
One of the main reasons to incorporate social media into marketing efforts is for the visibility it can earn your brand and website. When you share engaging, entertaining, informative content on social media, your followers will hopefully share it with their friends, who may share it with theirs, earning you visibility that you would have never obtained otherwise. And since your posts have a link to your website, you also just earned a lot of traffic—and web traffic is definitely a ranking signal.
Inbound links are one of the top factors Google looks at when determining whether or not to show your site on the SERPs. While inbound links can be challenging to achieve, social media marketing is another way to get them. Just imagine how many inbound links you can receive if you share a link to your website that ‘goes viral.’ Of course, you have to make sure the content is useful or entertaining enough to be shared.
The best marketing campaign will reach your audience through multiple mediums. While you can use SEO to earn initial website clicks and email marketing to reinforce your message, social media provides a valuable platform to continue the conversation. The more communication you have with your target market, the more likely they are to convert.
The social media world moves quickly, and the content you posted yesterday is most likely forgotten today. But that can actually work in your favor. Social media is an excellent way to revive old content. If you wrote a blog post a year ago that still applies today, blast it out to social media followers. You probably have a lot of new followers since last time you posted it, and those who did see it the first time may not even remember it. Since older pages usually rank the highest in the SERPs (since they have more documented visits and clicks), you may as well add fuel to the fire and keep them going strong.
If nothing else, social media marketing allows you to test the value of the content you are putting on your website. With SEO, it can take time to see if your content is targeting the correct audience and keywords, but with social media, you can get instant feedback. Did anybody like, comment on, or share your post? Then that is the kind of content they want to see and the kind you should focus on with your SEO efforts.
Social media can be very powerful, but it also requires a specific skillset. Not just anyone can make social media marketing work. At Zero Gravity Marketing, we would love to help you incorporate it into your SEO campaign.