The link between SEO and social media isn’t understood to the fullest yet. However, there are easy, quick ways you can raise your search rankings and site traffic using social media.

Social media is about connecting with others and sharing things you find witty or intriguing. Sharing links to articles is one of the most common activities on social media. You often read about a news story going “viral.” Sharing on social media is how things go viral.

Becoming “internet famous” isn’t the point of using social media to boost your SEO, however, because internet fame lasts less than fifteen minutes. The purpose is to use social media to drive traffic to your website by having a high ranking in search engines.

Is Social Media a Factor in SEO Rankings?

The general consensus is that social media doesn’t directly affect SEO ranking. Social media can have an indirect influence on your SEO rankings through social signals.

Social signals are likes (Facebook,) retweets (Twitter,) pins (Pinterest), etc. It’s basically someone interacting with content that you’ve posted on your social media or sharing your content on their own social media.

It’s important to remember that not all search engines are equal. While Google doesn’t count likes and shares as a ranking factor, the search engine Bing does.

How Likes and Shares Impact SEO

Social media indirectly impacts SEO because it makes your content more visible via links and sharing, both of which are the backbone for most social media platforms.

Sharing content on social media leads to other people linking to the content. This is part of the link building process that affects a website’s SEO ranking. The basic tenant of link building is getting other websites to link to your content. Search engines use backlinks to rate the website’s authority and the relevance of your content to the query input into the search engine.

There are three main types of links that relate to SEO link building: internal links, outbound links and inbound links. Internal links are links on one page of your website linking to another page on your website. Outbound links are links from your website to another website on the internet. Inbound links are also known as backlinks and they are links from another website to your site.

Shares are helpful in driving traffic to your website, which may boost the site’s authority to the search engine bots.

Tips for Optimizing Social Media for SEO

Despite what Google says, there are ways to benefit your SEO through using your social media to increase internet visibility. Here are a few tips on how to optimize your social media for a higher SEO ranking without even asking for your followers to share your content.

1. Use Hashtags

Using hashtags is a simple way to get a small SEO boost because hashtags are basically keywords. They can help you characterize your content. And everyone loves a good hashtag!

Keep in mind that hashtags aren’t universal across all social media platforms. For example, hashtags are more commonly used on Twitter and Instagram than they are on Facebook, although Facebook is catching up on the trend.

2. Make High-Quality Content

Internet users have short attention spans. Your content will have about 10 seconds (or less) to reel people in and keep them there for the long click.

Most search engines calculate how long users stay on a website before they click back to the search engine or to another site. If a user clicks on a site and bounces away to another site within a few seconds, search engines deem that site irrelevant and not great, pushing the site’s SEO ranking in the gutter.

How can you make your content high-quality? Snappy headlines, images and videos are three simple ways to make your website high-quality and worthy of a social media share. And, of course, you want to make your text content high-quality with proper spelling, grammar within the short sentences.

Once you have high-quality content, be sure to add buttons on your website for easy sharing to social media.

3. Be Active on Social Media

So you’ve gone through all of this trouble to build yourself a social media presence but then you disappear. That certainly won’t do much good for your SEO. Your followers will want to engage with you, especially if your content is great.

Being active on social media and engaging with your followers can earn you links and shares that you wouldn’t have without the engagement.

You can build your brand locally by following and sharing content from your local businesses and influencers.

Another tip is to interact with your followers in the comments or reviews. Interacting with people on your social media encourages the algorithms to consider your content active, boosting your online profile.

Have you ever followed someone on social media because you enjoyed their content, only to have them stop posting new content? It’s frustrating and disappointing, but eventually you find other content to follow.

That’s how social media works – out of sight, out of mind. Stay on top of releasing new content to keep your followers happy and possibly bring in new followers.

How to Optimize Your Social Media Profiles

Optimizing your social media profile is an important, but often ignored, part of how to use social media to boost your SEO ranking. If done incorrectly, it can have a negative effect on your SEO rankings because internet users aren’t sure which result on the search engine is the correct one.

As an example, Google your own name and see where your social media ranks in the results, if anywhere.

Steps in optimizing your social media profiles:
Use the same profile picture for all your social media accounts.
Include keywords relevant to your website content in your social media bios.
Put a direct link to your website in your bio.
Include an email address in your bio in case your followers want to contact you
Update your social media content multiple times a day, if possible

There are over 2 billion users across all the various social media platforms. If you keep active, engaging profiles on the most popular platforms, that’s 2 billion sets of eyes that could potentially view or share your content to help boost your SEO rankings.