The Role of Social Networks in Search Engine Optimization

SEO (search engine optimization) and SMM (social media marketing) are different branches of Internet marketing, which nevertheless are very interconnected. Both SEO and SMM help attract more traffic to your website. Choosing between SEO and SMM does not always make sense since these approaches work better when combined.

What is the difference between SEO and SMM?

SMM involves various marketing activities on social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and others. SEO has to do with search engines like Google or Bing.

The main task of SMM is to create a community of involved and active people around the brand/company. The main task of SEO is to bring the website to the top search results based on relevant search requests. 

Accordingly, goals are achieved in different ways. SEO activities are aimed at website loading speed optimization, link building, content creation, etc. For SMM, communities are created and supervised, targeted advertising is set up, and a content plan is developed.

The mutual goal of both SEO and SMM is to promote and sell products and services. SEO and SMM influence each other. The impact of SMM on SEO begins with social signals.

Social signals 

Social signals are user actions:

• Likes/dislikes
• Reposts
• Shares
• Comments
• The total number of subscribers/community members.

The influence of social signals on website promotion is crucial. 

How SMM affects search engine optimization

Google says that the links from Twitter and Facebook influence the ranking. But at the same time, robots place great emphasis on the credibility of the social account. User activity in social networks can affect the position of a site in search results directly and indirectly.

Direct social factors influencing the SEO ranking:

• The activity of users in a group/page (the already mentioned social signals) is tracked and analyzed by search robots. Weblinks leading to communities often appear in search results along with the original website.

• When you create interesting content and publish links on social networks, users click on them. Then they share content with their friends – traffic grows.

• Actual links are not directly indexed, but they are considered as bonuses to the usefulness of the website for users.

Indirect factors:

• Here I should mention behavioral factors. Their influence is huge. Search engines actively monitor many of these indicators. For example, viewing depth, total time spent on page and site, bounce rate, etc. Let’s agree, the user who comes across a post in the feed and follows the link is already interested in the content. Such a user will stay on the site longer because he is the target audience; your content is relevant to his interests.

• Site performance: posts and links on social networks are indexed faster than blog articles. Fast-bots work with social networks to help other bots learn about new pages on the main site. 

Social networks for SEO: what to consider

Pay attention to the following SMM factors that are most important for search engines:

• The presence of links to the site and the company accounts in social networks.
• The presence and clickability of the social buttons on the site.
• The presence of all contact details in your social account.
• The level of user activity in your social accounts.
• Special hashtags in posts.
• The regularity of the appearance of new content on the site and in social networks.
• Availability of Open Graph markup.

So, the main thing is to have pages and groups in social networks, integrate them with the site, and actively maintain them. 

Links from social networks do not transmit link weight; therefore, they do not directly affect the search engine ranking. Here is the list of seo tools recommended for monitoring social activity.

Twitter

Search engines like this social network very much. Your account must be popular and receive a lot of likes, retweets, comments. There is absolutely no sense to have plenty of bots among the subscribers.

Facebook

Facebook looks mysterious. Links are marked as nofollow, but a lot of SEO specialists have noticed that Google sees and indexes them. In any case, this is not the only thing that search robots are looking at. Likes, shares, and reposts increase the credibility of the site. Moreover, on Facebook, you can like not only posts but also the page itself. Besides, Facebook is one of the most influential social networks, it has great advertising opportunities and an enthusiastic audience. Building a group on Facebook is about getting to know your target audience almost face to face.

YouTube

YouTube is a quickly growing instrument in the hands of qualified SEO specialists. Social activity manifested by the number of views, subscribers and clicks on links attract traffic. Some videos appear in search results.

Conclusion

SMM and SEO are a tandem that all Internet marketers should use. SMM and SEO are useful for their interconnectedness. Content is the main thing in SMM and SEO. Quality content will attract users from both social networks and search engines.