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Does Social Media Help SEO?
“Does social media help with SEO?” The overall answer is yes, it does! It does not directly affect your SEO (search engine optimization) ranking, but the factors will affect your SEO ranking. Let’s take a look at how your social media can help impact your SEO ranking.
Increase Website Traffic
When posting content on your Instagram page with an article linked back to your website, you’ll help bring in traffic. This happens because your followers will click through to that story thus increasing website visitation.
Increase Brand Visibility
Social media sites including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest can increase brand visibility by attracting new followers to your social pages and new visitors to your website. Higher unique content reach through shares, likes and engagement increases how much your content is seen, which all plays a key role in driving traffic to your website.
This will, in turn, increase your ranking, placing your business higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and boosting visibility. As a result, content reach increases along with the chance that more people will see and continue engaging with your company and website.
Social Media on Search Engines
Google also crawls and indexes social media platforms in the SERPs. When crawling, the search engine will not take the number of followers into account. Even if your social channels are start-ups, if relevant, engaging, and authoritative content is being shared, Google will use these signals to rank your profiles higher.
In fact, social media profiles can often be among the top results in branded searches. For example, when conducting a google search for Invisalign, the company’s Twitter, Facebook and YouTube accounts appear as the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th results.
Target the Right Audience
When you are using your social media platforms to help with your SEO, remember the target audience you are trying to reach with your business.
One of the newest forms of social media platforms that businesses are using to get traffic to their products and websites is TikTok. Businesses can allow their content to show up on users’ “For You” page (FYP) to bring potential new customers to the business. TikTok is a great platform to utilize if you are looking to promote certain content to target a certain audience. You can use keywords as well as the algorithm to push content that people are looking for.
Final Thoughts
The best advice I would give to any practice that is considering adding social media accounts to their portfolio to advertise and connect with patients and customers, is start by analyzing what platforms would reach your demographic the most.
When wanting to connect with families or the older generations, I would consider Facebook, as most consumers have that platform. If you are wanting to reach the teenage demographic to early adults, I would consider using Instagram and TikTok to connect as it will continue to show up on the customers’ stories, feed or FYP.
Feel free to reach out to our SEO team if you have any other questions about utilizing your social media to help increase your SEO rankings.
—Aliah Rasmussen, SEO Specialist II, Sesame Communications