Social Media & SEO
Social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, all have an ever growing influence on your Google organic SERP’s rankings.
The reasoning behind this is that it is natural that real businesses will be talked about socially. By contrast, sites created just to ‘steal’ Google traffic to re-sell, etc. is less likely to be mentioned, recommended and discussed on social channels.
In the last few years, the influence of social media has increased and is destined to continue to only become more so going forwards.
SEO & Social Sharing
Social shares are becoming a significant indicator of the quality of your site content. Social accounts are difficult to fake in volume, making them a useful signal for Google to use as a quality signal.
The ideal social account sharing process, is for one of your website visitors to share your page of content on their Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn account. Once they have shared it with all of their contacts, you then want their contacts to share it again with all of their friends and contacts.
This process is very difficult to fake successfully, which only serves to increase the influence of the process.
Post ‘Likes’
Many people misunderstand how to use their social media accounts to best effect for SEO purposes. We see many people using their Facebook accounts to post useful information that then receives large quantities or shares and likes, BUT….. because the post doesn’t originate as a shared web page, the traffic generated never makes it back into their website, so has no positive impact on their Google SERP’s.
This is an easy problem to fix.
The addition of social sharing buttons on all of your web and blog post pages, allows people to easily & quickly ‘share’ your website content with their friends. This frequently happens with product pages, new and exciting product launches etc.
If one of your website pages of content is shared on Facebook, then that post will contain a direct link straight back to your website content, making it really easy in one click for other users to get to your content. In turn, they will then either re-share your web page, or, they may share the Facebook post again.
Both of these ‘shares’ are high quality signals that your content is valued by real people, reinforcing the quality signals, telling Google that your website page contains good information that genuine users will find useful.
Brand Mentions
We are all ‘Brands’, whether we like it or not. Some are more well known than others, but your business is a Brand and you need to think of it as a Brand that you are building.
Brands are talked about, and the best Brands are talked about most often. Google trusts Brands, which is why at present (2015) household Brands tend to dominate Google SERP’s. Amazon, eBay, John Lewis, Screwfix, etc. are all household Brands that Google has confidence in. They can trust them, knowing that they are a reliable provider. That is why they rank so well organically.
For many smaller niche boutiques, this has created a significant ranking obstacle. Smaller, less well known businesses have much smaller customer bases. In turn, far less people talk about those small boutiques, so they struggle to compete in search.
The answer to this is to build your social presence, more fans, more followers, more social activity, creating a network of fans who in turn, share your goods, services and offerings with their friends.
To a certain extent, Google will bear in mind that smaller brands need exposure too, but you need to send a consistent stream of positive quality social signals if you are going to compete with the multinationals.
In some respects, smaller niche businesses have some ranking advantages compared to the massive multinationals, but they need to be smart in how they manage and maintain their social media accounts to extract the maximum impact.
We work with many Brands, building their online authority, helping them to engage with their audience and attract the social signals that will tell Google that they can be trusted.
Ask us how we can help you to market your Brand and we will put in place proven processes for you…