The relationship between social media and search engine optimization (SEO) is very significant for the growth of your business’s online presence. Both of these inbound strategies work together to build a unique identity that causes consumers to choose your content naturally.  

Let’s first define SEO! Wikipedia defines (SEO) as “the process of affecting the visibility of a website or web page in a web search engine’s unpaid results.” The definition says “affecting the visibility,” which could be a very good thing or a bad thing for your business. If your business ranking is low there is an opportunity to fix what’s not working.

Let’s understand the front end and the back end of these two strategies and how to use it to your businesses best advantage.

What is a search engine algorithm?

Brick Marketing, defines a search engine algorithm as “a set of rules, or unique formula, that the search engine uses to determine the significance of a web page, and each search engine has its own set of rules." Your business has to expand its concept of SEO to include traditional search engines and also social search engines.

Traditional search engines ranking factors

During my research, I came across a ton of infographics giving detailed descriptions of different search engine ranking factors. Some listed domain factors as the top influencer that affects your ranking. Others listed items like page-level factors, backlink factors, user-interaction, site-level factors and many more.

They also listed social signals as an influencer in higher SEO ranking. Social media profiles are often amongst the top results in search listings for brand names (see the example below).

To drive home how important social platforms are to your SEO strategy, here are a few data points about social search engines:

• As of 2010, Twitter handles 19 billion search queries a month.
• In 2012 Facebook said it got around one billion search queries per day.
• As March 2010, YouTube got roughly 3.7 billion search queries a month.

Not only does your business have to conform to traditional search engines, but you also have to include social search engines!

Social media practices to boost SEO ranking

Whether you’re ranking high on Google, Bing or Yahoo, the key is to give your followers an experience and useful tips. Doing so encourages them to keep your business as their top reference. The more brand searches, the higher you’ll rank. Here are four helpful tips to  maintaining a popular social media presence that boost your search engine ranking:

1. Grow your audience.

The total number of followers and connections your social media profiles contain does have a significant influence on your ranking. Remember that you should gain connections organically. This is the key to boosting your SEO ranking. Stay unique to your business goals and engage your followers through direct conversations and helpful tips!

2. Increase the number of likes and shares you receive.

The number of likes and or shares you gain on your social media profiles boosts your SEO ranking. This allows people to see your information across the social platform and encourages other external sites to link to your content.

3. Build authority on your social accounts.

It seems that the obvious goal for entrepreneurs and small businesses is to gain high authority on their social media profiles. Increasing your reputation on social media, through increased engagement and high-quality content syndication, will lead to increased online brand presence.

4. Have verified social accounts.

Search Engine Journal stated that “Google CEO Eric Schmidt claimed within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top verified results.” If your social media profile isn’t verified, don’t worry! Remember it takes time to build a loyal audience, but make it a long-term goal to become verified.

Do you have other social media best practices that help you boost your ranking online? Let me know in the comments below.

Are you looking for help with your SEO practices? Contact Milwaukee content marketing agency, Accelity Marketing. Let’s get ranking!