3 Ways Social Media Can Benefit Your SEO Strategy

With so many websites competing for first page rankings, search engine optimization, or SEO, is more important than ever. And social media strategy can play a large role in SEO.

But it may not help in the ways you imagine.

Let’s get one thing straight: Google doesn’t care how many Twitter followers or Facebook “likes” you have. But social media has several other tangible benefits you can leverage to improve your organic search results.

Compelling social media drives traffic to your site.

It seems like the proverbial Catch-22, but the more people who visit your site, the higher your site will rank on Google. Creating great content and sharing it through social media channels can bring visitors to your site, which will tell Google you have a site worth visiting.

Social media links have SEO value.

Backlinks still count, big-time, for SEO. And when you share links to your content on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, you are creating backlinks from high-quality websites to your site.

Your social media profiles can rank high on Google, too.

It’s not easy to get a website to rank on Google’s first page. But if your social media pages rise to the top of Google rankings, that can help you dominate organic search. If someone finds your Twitter profile or Facebook page through Google, they can learn a lot about you and your brand and may, ultimately, decide to visit your site.

On-site SEO and social media should work together as part of a comprehensive SEO strategy, increasing brand visibility and improving rankings.