The Relationship Between SEO and Social Media

While social media doesn’t directly affect SEO ranking, it can help you get your brand in front of the right audience.

Video Transcript

David: You wanted to know about social media and SEO and their relationship?

Dave: Yeah. How does social media help the website’s SEO?

David: To this, I defer to my resident social media expert, Stephanie Nielsen, who I trust in all things social media.

Stephanie: Okay. So here is my take on the whole thing. What I tell my clients is I want them to be able to take up as many of those results pages spots as possible. Right? And so that’s not just your website. Your LinkedIn bio can be indexed. Your Facebook page, not individual posts, but your Facebook page and your Twitter account bio can be indexed. So, when looking at the company’s big picture, I want to make sure all of those pieces are optimized to be found for roughly the same keyword. Also, each individual social media outlet can be looked at as its own search engine. So, people are searching LinkedIn for a social media provider. They’re searching Facebook for a social media provider. They’re searching Twitter for… So, I want my bio to be able to be found in all of those different places. So, it’s not necessarily whether those outlets point to your website and get your website indexed. It is getting each of those points indexed by the search engines to show up on those results pages.

David: Yeah. I agree. The only thing I’d add to that is the relationship between social media and link building. Only certain links count for Google’s algorithm, and most social media links don’t. For the fact that Facebook can’t be indexed by Google. The fact that the links are no-follow. Just stuff like that. So, we’re not like building links to our website using social media and thinking we’re affecting Google’s algorithm. However, as we share our posts on social media, they get out in front of the right people, and they are a way to encourage people to comment, critique, and add to our articles by helping them encounter them. So, one of the reasons we want to have a blog that’s very active on our website for SEO is the long tail. Right? All the keywords that we couldn’t possibly predict would bring us traffic and customers. Right? But also, if we take the time to write good content, sometimes accidentally, we will build links to our website as people say, oh, here’s a really great article about blue widgets. And we’re the only people writing about blue widgets. If someone else wants to write about blue widgets, they’re going to have to reference us as a source. I have one client whose entire link-building strategy is to write new and interesting articles. Then they just have this influx of new links to their website just by writing stuff on their own website because they take time to write high-quality stuff. That’s an unusual circumstance. But the proof is in the pudding. I’ll even notice as I blog on my own website, every once in a while, something’s going to get picked up. And I’ll get a link because someone will say, “Oh, I never knew that you could use Screaming Frog to build an internal link to a website. Here’s a great resource.” Because I took the time to create a great resource, social media helps get that out in front of the eyeballs of people who need to see it, increasing the opportunity for it to be received as a link. In fact, in Curious Ants, somewhere, I have an article or a guide I wrote… Let me see if I can find it for you. Okay. So, I’m going to share my screen. Here is the “How to Write a Blog Post for SEO” article. Right? And this is part of the process. Hopefully, you could do one at least once a month. There’s not a time frame for frequency, right? It’s not like once a month somehow triggers some sort of Google algorithm. It’s like if you can at least do something once a month, you can start to see it. But more is even better. At the bottom step, number seven is don’t forget to promote it. And this talks about why and how you do it. You send it to your email list again. Get it in front of eyeballs. Share it over social media. They don’t typically help your links, but they get it in front of the right people. Things like that. That’s the relationship in my mind with social media and search. It’s helping syndicate your contact to get in front of more eyeballs. I should say it this way. I am not a social media person, unlike Stephanie. So, my social media strategy is called vomiting – where I just throw content on social media. That’s not a social media strategy. I know this. Stephanie is embarrassed about my social media strategy. But if I had an actual social media strategy, my vomit would actually have eyeballs. Again, sorry, we’ve talked about cat vomit. Now we’re talking about content vomit. This isn’t a very appetizing conversation, apparently. What do you think, Dave? Does that get you in the right direction?

Dave: Yeah, that kind of makes sense. Well, the one thing that I’m wondering about is when this is the LinkedIn bio, the Facebook page, or Twitter accounts for different keywords, those would be your main keywords. Will Google show those in the results as well? They will, right?

Stephanie: Yeah.