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SEO and Social Media: How Social Media Affects Your SEO ROI

Explaining the relationship between SEO and social media can be tricky because there are many different opinions on the subject – even among professionals. However, there seem to be a lot of benefits and nuances to using social media to improve the ROI of your SEO campaign, even if in most cases it doesn't have a direct impact on your rankings.

Today, we're getting to the bottom of social media's role in search engine optimization to see if we can provide answers once and for all.

Is social media a ranking factor?

Google has admitted that social media signals are not a direct ranking factor for them. However, if you search for some brands on Google, you'll see that their social media accounts like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook rank higher in search results than their official company website.

You can also find recent social media posts on search engine results pages (SERPs), suggesting that brands can control a significant portion of the traffic to their social media accounts directly from search.

Plus, features like Facebook Page ratings show up in Google search results, which can help brands build trust and authority. Even though social media doesn't directly impact search results, there's no denying that a strong social presence increases your visibility.

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Note: It should be noted that Bing uses social signals as a ranking factor. Even though the majority of traffic comes from Google, by optimizing our social media presence, we also help our site rank better in Bing's search results.

What role do social media play in search engine optimization?

Even though you can't get direct benefits for search engine ranking from social media, there are many ways your social presence supports your website's SEO efforts:

Social media encourages the redirection of visitors to your website.

Although traffic from social networks doesn't have the same consistency as organic SEO traffic, social media can help you send targeted visitors to your website who want to read your content or buy your products/solutions.

It increases the length of time users spend on your site (dwell time).

In general, visitors who are referred to your site through social media spend more time on your site, which is a very valuable engagement metric. It also signals to search engines that your website offers valuable content that users want to engage with.

Social media creates opportunities for backlinks.

When you post on social media, you never know who will interact with your content. Even the owners of authoritative websites can find your pages through social media posts and decide to give you a backlink if it adds value to their readers.

It could help you index new pages faster.

By promoting your new articles and pages on social media, you're creating new opportunities for Google to find and index your content. Social networks can also help Google find these pages, and if they're well visited, that's a clear sign to search engines that your pages are worth including in the SERPs.

Social media gives you more psychographic data about your audience.

As people reveal more information about themselves on social media, you can get an idea of your target audience's beliefs, fears, and problems. These social media metrics help you create useful, engaging website content that's tailored to your visitors.

The 5 Best Social Media Platforms for SEO

To help you choose the right platform to support your SEO campaign, we've compiled a list of the best social media platforms that can help you expand your SEO efforts:

1. Pinterest

Pinterest works more or less like a search engine, even if it's a social media platform. Over 1 billion active searches are generated on Pinterest per month, making it an ideal platform for bloggers, online marketers, and eCommerce stores.

Unlike other social apps, Pinterest doesn't limit the reach of a post to a single outbound link (as with Instagram and TikTok with the unique link in the profile).

To rank in Pinterest search results, you need to create creative Pins and optimize them with the right keywords. Don't forget to create an outgoing link to your website with each pin. Video Pins are going viral on Pinterest, which you can take advantage of.

2. Quora

Surely it has happened to you before that you entered a question in Google and the first result that Google showed you was from Quora.

Quora is a social media platform where people ask questions and get the answers in real time. This makes them a fantastic platform for you to build authority by providing helpful answers.

You can generate traffic directly from Google and from the platform itself. According to Similar Web, over 500 million people visit Quora every month. 

To get the most out of Quora, you need to provide insightful, really helpful answers. You can also add links to your website if it's relevant to the question and complements your answer.

Note: If you're new to Quora, it's better not to set outbound links for the first few weeks.

3. LinkedIn

Although LinkedIn was designed as a professional networking platform, it has become the first choice for B2B marketers to generate leads.

If your target audience is made up of top professionals like CEOs, CMOs, and decision makers, LinkedIn is the best platform to promote your content and create a presence.

Compared to platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, it's easier to gain visibility on LinkedIn if you have a solid content strategy.

Although you can create a company page on LinkedIn, most users prefer to follow and interact with other professionals. In other words, the best way to share and have conversations about your brand and content is through your CEO's profile.

4. Facebook

Facebook has over 10 billion monthly visits and is the 3rd most visited website in the world. It's very easy to share web content like blog posts, eCommerce products, and websites on Facebook.

The great thing about these numbers — in addition to the large pool of users you can reach — is that Google continuously crawls and indexes Facebook pages as well as other pages. This allows your company and product pages to appear in the SERPs and help Google find new content faster.

However, the best Facebook feature is the paid ad campaign. If you invest a certain budget in promoting your web content, you can quickly reach new readers and conduct CTR experiments to optimize content.

5. Twitter

Twitter has over 6 billion monthly visits, making it the 7th most visited website in the world. Similar to Facebook, posting on Twitter can help you gain more space in the SERPs, as Twitter carousels now appear on the results pages.

Twitter also allows you to share links in your tweets. So be sure to add a backlink to your content when promoting it on the social network. While this won't give you link authority, it will give you relevant references to your website.

A good rule of thumb is that you should spend 40% of your time on Twitter talking about your industry, giving practical and useful tips, and retweeting content from relevant brands. The second 40% you should invest in interacting with other brands and users, and the last 20% you should invest in promoting your own content.

5 Strategies to Bring SEO and Social Media Together

We hope that by now you have a clear understanding of how social media can affect your website's traffic and how it fits into your overall SEO strategy.

To help you achieve your goals, we would like to introduce you to some best practices that will help you successfully integrate SEO and social media:

1. Make advertising an important part of your content strategy

Advertising your content on social media has many benefits, but as long as it's not associated with the process of content development, it will affect your reach.

Instead, bring SEO and social media teams together to plan SEO-relevant content and figure out how best to promote it on social networks.

Some articles, such as lists or step-by-step guides, can easily be broken down into LinkedIn posts, Twitter threads, etc. If you keep the teams close together, you'll have a more coherent marketing strategy.

2. Create a calendar for website and social content

Creating a content calendar for both the website and social content gives you an overview of what to do and when. It also allows your team to collaborate and better coordinate efforts.

And since social media is a medium that works almost in real time, the platform allows you to create seasonal content to drive visitors to old pages that are relevant at certain times of the year.

3. Make your web content easily shareable

By optimizing on-page SEO and other technical SEO factors, your blog will only be prepared for placement in search results. If you want to harness the power of social media, you need to make sure that your blog posts can also be easily shared.

You want to support your loyal readers who love your articles and want to share them with their friends and relatives on social media by adding sharing buttons on any popular platform. It's also a good idea to formulate a compelling call to action to encourage users to share your content.

On the technical side, you need to pay attention to your Open Graph protocol to avoid problems when sharing content in social applications.

4. Effective content reuse

Creating great content is not an easy task. It takes time and creativity to create and implement great content. To use them effectively, it's a good idea to take the best content from one platform and optimize it for another platform.

For example, if a post on LinkedIn generates a lot of comments, likes, and shares, that's a good indicator that your audience wants to learn or know more about the topic and that it might be worth writing a longer post for your blog.

Conversely, powerful articles and pages can be turned into social posts to bring new visitors to the pages and keep the conversation going.

5. Use social media to find keywords

Keeping an eye on the latest trends on social media such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram can help you identify new keywords that can bring you big traffic gains without having to compete with other websites. Social media may be the best place to find these low-hanging fruits.

Another source of great keywords are recurring questions that your audience asks you through social media. If enough people ask the same questions over and over again, it can be an indication of a substantive gap that you need to fill.

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Sure, social media doesn't have a direct impact on your organic rankings, but it definitely has a place in the SEO playbook. After all, content marketing is the fuel for both strategies, and so it's only natural for both channels to complement each other.

Ultimately, it's not just about improving your rankings, but also about increasing the quality of the traffic you drive to your website. Platforms like Quora, Twitter, and LinkedIn can help you find and attract your ideal audience.