You are probably always searching for ways to improve your small business SEO as a business owner. However, you may wonder if social media deserves your time or attention.
The fact is, social media plays a role in SEO for small businesses in several ways. It helps companies and businesses deliver content to a larger audience, which results in several benefits. For example, it results in more SERP real estate for branded queries, improved engagement signals, and more backlinks.
Taking time to understand how SEO and social media marketing work together in your digital marketing strategy will help improve performance on both channels. Reaching a larger audience on social media allows you to create much more targeted content. Also, investing time and effort into SEO research lets you know what your social audience wants to read.
Keep reading to better understand the relationship between social media and SEO for small businesses.
The Basics of Social Media and Small Business SEO
There’s a term that’s used to describe the relationship between SEO and social media – social SEO. This refers to how you can use social media as an indirect tool to help increase your organic search rankings and visibility.
Although social media won’t directly impact SEO, the social signals it provides (i.e., comments, shares, and likes) are acquired by people who interact with your content on social media. This contributes to building customer loyalty and trust while driving brand awareness, which helps increase your online traffic and visibility.
Understanding the Importance of Social Media to SEO
Social media’s impact on small business SEO is more complex than just saying “yes, it does,” or “no, it doesn’t” work.
For example, Bing ranks pages with more shares higher than pages that don’t have as many. Bing Webmaster Guidelines have confirmed this. This means that when it comes to Bing rankings, having social shares plays a part in overall SEO results.
On the other hand, Google has stated explicitly that social media is not considered a direct ranking factor. However, some studies have shown a relationship between your social shares and where you rank in search engines. Although Google has stated that this isn’t a ranking factor – this doesn’t mean it won’t impact your site.
Social media’s indirect effect on small business SEO can’t be ignored. It won’t directly improve rankings, but it can provide new link-building and content marketing opportunities that will give your rankings a boost.
Since this information is somewhat contradictory, you may wonder what the available relationships are. Find out here.
Social Media Results in Increased Visibility and More Links
Social media benefits small business SEO by working to help you build more inbound links. Everyone knows that having quality backlinks is crucial in ranking higher on Google and increasing your domain authority. Social media is also an effective way to build links.
When your audience engages with your content, they will probably share it, which will increase overall visibility. The increased visibility means that the content is much more likely to be found and read. Social sharing can increase the number of links coming to your site while improving credibility. Increasing credibility will improve SEO, and social media helps improve content promotion. This can lead more people to link to your content from their sites and profiles.
Social Media Will Improve Your SEO Small Business Ranking Signals
Social shares may not be a ranking factor, but the time someone spends on the page and site is. Because of this, social media benefits SEO for small businesses by helping improve these metrics that do impact your rankings.
Social media will drive more traffic to pages optimized for search, improving engagement and visibility. The premise is simple – if you target the right audience on social media with relevant content, they will stay on your website longer. This matters because the length of every interaction is factored into the ranking algorithm used by Google.
It’s possible to use highly targeted posts on social media to help increase how long people spend on your site, which can increase overall search rankings over time.
Have Content Indexed Faster by Posting on Social Media
You can use your business’s social media outlets to have your pages indexed faster on Google. After you have new or refreshed content published on your site, share it on various social media channels to generate clicks. This is will signal to Google that the page needs to be crawled and should be re-indexed.
Improve Small Business SEO Content with Social Interaction Data
Factors like click-through rates in the SERPs (search engine results pages), time on page, time on site, and bounce rates are all parts of interaction data used by search engines to help properly rank content. Many believe improving the metrics is possible if you test and measure various interactions via social media.
It’s also a good idea for marketers to use the social communities built by the brand as a type of sounding board to see what content will be most effective.
You may wonder how.
You can find what social media posts receive the most engagement and then use the insights to create other page titles and descriptions. If people click on one post on social media, they are also likely to click on the article if they see it in search engine results.
It’s possible to use social interaction data from your social media dashboard to help improve your meta descriptions and titles. However, it doesn’t stop there. It can also be used to figure out what topic clusters you need to start building out.
The goal of small business SEO is not to generate more organic traffic but it is to generate relevant traffic and increase conversions. Knowing the content that users are engaging with will help you achieve this.
Build Search Demand for Social Media
Compared to the other marketing channels, social media will also benefit small business SEO in more unique ways. Not only will sharing content help you engage on these platforms, but it will also help bring more visitors to your site, increasing the site’s visibility.
Use Social Media to Identify Your Audience for SEO Content
One of the best things about social media is you can find out who your audience is. You can also discover what they need, what their desires and feelings are, and more. Once you have this profile, you can learn about their tendencies. This includes where they visit online and what they are searching for.
When you do this, you will find that it is easy to find the keywords to target because they are extremely relevant and customized to people who are most likely to conduct business with you. Having this knowledge and promoting your content where they go online will significantly increase your overall results for SEO for small businesses.
You can test out what types of articles will work the best with what demographics and then use the information to offer feedback to the individual or team you have to create content.
Use Social Media for Conducting Keyword Research
You can follow social listening trends to find new keyword opportunities for your content and profiles. This will show you what people are searching for, what they want to read about and follow, and what will help your site rank higher in SERPs.
Creating and publishing “ask the expert” posts on social media is also smart. This effectively boosts engagement while finding all-new ideas for the long-tail question and answer keywords your customers are searching for and that they care about.
Based on your industry and the platform, you may need to boost the posts to gain traction.
Understanding the Relationship Between Small Business SEO and Social Media
As you can see, there are more than a few ways to use social media to boost your small business SEO. Be sure to keep the information here in mind. It will help you use these platforms to their full potential while improving your SEO. Consider reaching out for professional assistance, which will ensure that your SEO and social media are working well together.
In the long run, this will pay off and benefit your site with increased traffic. It will even help boost your position in SERPs, which is a top priority for most businesses today.