SEO and Social: How Do They Interact?
It is most likely that social media can benefit your SEO rankings. What may come as a surprise is just how it does so. Here is a brief guide to the excellent social media and SEO world.
The Good old days
When Google first started (way back in 1998), SEO meant targeting keywords and backlinks. These tactics are still used today, but their importance has been reduced. Google soon discovered that this simple approach was vulnerable to exploitation by what was known as black hat SEO and hence began to look for ways to make its search algorithm more sophisticated.
- In the intervening 20 years, Google has incorporated ever more criteria into its ranking system to a point where it is now a little short of impossible to crack through technical sleight of hand.
What Google can and can’t do
Google analyses all data elements to determine the most relevant user search results. What Google can’t do is analyse data owned by other websites, which, for one reason or another, may decline to cooperate with it.
Facebook, for example, has two good reasons for refraining from cooperating with Google. The first is that Facebook and Google are in direct competition for advertisers’ hearts, minds, and wallets. The second is that Facebook has to be aware of its obligations regarding user privacy, particularly given that the minimum (official) age for holding a Facebook account is 13, at which age people are generally still treated as minors in the eyes of the law.
For its part, Google has two good reasons to avoid placing too much emphasis on Facebook data when generating its search results: the first is that it’s generally a bad idea to create a situation where a core feature of your business depends on input from a direct competitor. The second is that Facebook data is of questionable reliability.
Hard to determine
While it may be hard to determine just how many social media accounts are fake in one way or another, some accounts are set up in ways that are officially forbidden, e.g., for use by bots, for instance. It’s also a harsh reality that the importance of ranking highly in Google is such that if it became common knowledge that likes and shares on Facebook could boost Google rankings directly, it’s a safe bet that Facebook would quickly see an upsurge in fake accounts set up for that purpose in an echo of the old black hat days. Similar issues apply to other social media platforms.
Why social media can still boost your SEO
The whole point of using social media is to boost engagement with your brand. From e-commerce to solicitors and large brands like Netflix, organic likes and shares are a pretty good indicator of how well your followers receive your content.
The key to practical social media usage is to turn this platform-based engagement into engagement with your website, which will ultimately boost your Google ranking. More.
This is because Google will be able to identify that you have a high level of traffic and that your unique visitors are spending time on your site rather than just “bouncing” elsewhere immediately. Those are all pointers to a high-quality website, which Google will rank highly. In other words, even though social media can strongly influence your search ranking, the impact is indirect rather than direct.
See Do Google Use Social Media in their Search Algorithm? by Channel Digital
