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Social Media and SEO: Do Social Shares Affect SEO Rankings?

Updated: Apr 23, 2020

Do social shares affect Website SEO Rankings?

We all know that SEO strategies and other advanced marketing techniques help brands to boost their search engine rankings. One effective SEO tool that is overlooked and not talked about is –social media. Many experts believe that it is a complete waste of time to promote your products and services on social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. However, that is not the case.


The relationship between SEO and social media is not yet clear. However, if used properly, social media can help you rank much higher in search results.


In this post, we share the reasons why you need to share your content on social media and tips to improve your ranking from social media.


According to Google and some experts, social media does not impact search rankings. However, contrary to their belief, social signals such as likes, shares, followers, and links all have some link to your ranking. If you check some of the websites that rank on the first pages of search engine results across different industries, you will observe that these websites have one of the best social presence of all the websites in that niche.


Did you know that Google is not the only search engine platform available?

According to statistics in 2019, it was discovered that while Google still boasted of being the most preferred search engine in the US at 63%, Bing( search engine) had about 24%. This is an interesting fact if you are looking to convert your social presence to higher rankings as social likes and shares are a direct ranking factor for Bing.


How does social presence impact Google rankings?


Simply put, social media alone does not cause higher rankings on Google. However, optimizing social media for SEO will enhance the ranking factors that Google does consider.


When you use social media for your business, there are more chances that people will network with you, tag with you, link to you, and even follow your profile. It also means that your content will also get shared easily. The more likes, shares, and links you get, the greater will be your popularity on social media. This will also boost traffic to your website.


This is exactly how social media affects SEO. All the sharing and tagging add up to more visibility of your content online.


Social media is meant for mass sharing. So, if you have a great social media presence, people will obviously share your content on different social media platforms. As people do this, it is likely that more people will link to it.


Links, as you know, are very important for Google SEO ranking. Now that you have understood the link between social media and SEO, have a look at some of the steps that you can consider to optimize your social shares, get more links, boost visibility online and rank higher on search results.

  • Optimize your social media profiles by making them more visual-friendly

  • Try to post original and highly-engaging content on social media

  • Post updates regularly

  • Optimize your website for social media

  • Engage with your audience( respond to their comments and queries)


Conclusion

Remember, most people today spend their time on social media. You will have to leverage this and convert it into opportunities to enhance your SEO efforts. The more popularity you generate on social media platforms, the more are the chances of you ranking higher on search results.

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