Although social media is not directly used by Google as part of their search ranking factors, evidence and observations from experts’ independent studies and research show that they are massively indexing social media pages, and these say a lot of what they are not sharing to the public.

One thing we learned from all these years, closely observing Google, is that, they don’t reveal a lot of significant aspects of their search algorithms to the public. They leave us to guess and find out what they are.

SEO has undergone tremendous shift through the years, and social media has become increasingly important in the last decade. In this article, we will discuss 5 ways social media can help boost your search rankings, and why you need to incorporate it into your overall SEO strategy.

1. Social Media helps you garner free, high-quality backlinks

Despite all the changes in the SEO landscape, backlinks still play an important role in your SERP rankings. Social media can help you accumulate free, high-quality back link from authoritative sites and some of these are do-follow ones.

Although there’s no confirmation from Google that backlink from social media pages can help boost rankings, independent experiments have shown otherwise. Thus, building your brand’s presence in popular social media websites should be a must if you want to get ahead of your competition.

2. Social Media promotes user engagement

Users sharing your content on their Facebook timelines may not help you rank in the SERPs (search engine result pages), but this shows that your site has a high level of user engagement, and search engines consider user engagement as a useful metric in ranking websites.

When you build your brand’s presence in social media, set organic engagement as part of your goals because this can help a lot in boosting your SEO.  The more people are engaged, the higher the chances of getting more online visibility, and most importantly, the higher the chance of ranking on the SERPs.

3. Social Media Profiles rank higher on the SERPs

Over the last few years, search engines have been indexing social media profiles of all users, including most businesses and brands. Often, these social media profiles are listed on the SERPs and are accorded a higher rank for the brand name. This gives you another avenue for getting more visitors, as a person searching for your brand will see your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest profiles among the first results displayed.

Search engines, such as Google, displaying your social media pages on top of the SERPs, is a big sign that they indeed are giving importance to social media, and this is one crucial factor that you should take note. If social media is of no importance, these search engines won’t rank them on top of the SERPs, but they did.

KISS PR CEO, Qamar Zaman, advises that you should make sure all your information is consistent across multiple social media channels, and you regularly update them with relevant content that attracts your target audience’s attention.  This is a tried and tested strategy to boost your engagement.

4. Social Media helps build brand awareness

Another often overlooked benefit of social media is the fact that it helps build brand awareness, which leads to a higher SERP ranking in the long run.

People tend to search more for popular brands or brands which they see on social media. Search engines take note of this and start giving higher ranks to brands with a huge number of followers. But, of course, we can’t get any confirmation about this from big search engines. All we have are our personal experiences and observations.

All we know from experience is that your brand’s visibility can indeed indirectly affect your rankings on the SERPs. The more people know about your brand, the higher the chances they’ll look for your online, follow and like your social media page, and engage with your content.

5. Social Media helps make your content viral

Social media is essential for any viral marketing campaign as indeed, viral marketing itself came into existence due to its contagious nature.

If you can get a piece of content published by you go viral, then you can easily see a jump in your SERP rankings. This happens because user engagement is one of the factors most search engines consider in ranking web pages on the SERPs.

Conclusion

Social media has been an integral part of SEO for almost a decade now, and its importance in boosting your rankings on the SERPs cannot be ignored. It is one of the best mediums to improve your search rankings, and most marketers have used this channel not only to boost rankings, but also to boost brand awareness and increase user engagement.

Integrating your social media efforts into your overall SEO strategy is very important. Leaving out social media from the equation is a bad decision, and can potentially decrease your brand’s online visibility and worst decrease your rankings on the SERPs. Good luck!

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