Correlation between Social Shares & Inbound Links
We all know that a healthy backlink profile affects organic rankings, as do on-page signals like website copy and meta titles and descriptions. As a result, these are some of the most important areas in which search engine optimization (SEO) professionals concentrate their efforts in their campaigns. However, the impact of social signals on Google’s ranking has been a hotly debated topic, with observations contradicting Google’s assurances.
The key question now is whether social media affects SEO ranking. As stated by Matt Cutts in 2014, Google’s official view is that social signals are not used to rank pages for SEO. Many SEO pros appear to disagree, citing evidence of a link between larger social shares and higher organic ranks.
So, how does it all work if there is a link between your social media presence and your organic ranking? Let’s look at the various ways in which social media might affect SEO.
Increased website traffic
When you’re just starting, it can be difficult to create momentum because SEO takes time to provide results. Meanwhile, search engines consider user behavior indications such as time on site and pages per session when ranking websites. When you don’t have enough traffic, increasing those user behavior signals might be exceedingly tough.
Opportunity for Backlinking
Off-page signals like backlinks can have a major impact on your organic ranking. In fact, total referring domains and total backlinks are among the top-ranking indicators according to SEMrush Ranking Factors 2.0. So, to climb to the top of Google search rankings, you should obtain as many backlinks from reputable websites as possible.
Increasing Authority and Credibility
Search engines use topical authority to establish relevance when ranking a page in search results. This implies they consider how much authority the page has on the topic or search query in order to provide high-quality and relevant results to users. As a result, creating high-quality content on a regular basis is critical for establishing topical authority and trust in the eyes of search engines and humans alike.
Because social media sites are exactly like any other website, the links you earn from them also count toward your backlinks; according to Matt Cutts’ comment, Google treats Facebook and Twitter pages the same as any other page. Although it does not perform any crawling or indexing for such pages, links from social media qualify as backlinks to your site. This suggests that increasing the number of link shares on social media could be a powerful approach to improving your backlink profile.
- YouTube
YouTube, the world’s second most popular website, receives much attention in search results. YouTube videos frequently appear highly in relevant search results for helpful keywords, particularly those that include the phrase “how to.” As a result, it is one of the most effective social media sites for SEO.
Facebook is currently the third most popular social media site in the world. Furthermore, with Google crawling certain of its pages, you have a good possibility of appearing in relevant search results.
Twitter is the epicenter of hot conversations, making it an ideal medium for enhancing social signals. Twitter shares, engagements, and visibility may help you acquire traction and generate relevant visitors to your website.
Pinterest is another popular social network that impacts your SEO, with over 5 billion monthly searches. Platform results appear prominently in certain queries, particularly when users are looking for ideas. Furthermore, Pinterest leads the Google image results in many searches, which suggests that focusing on Pinterest SEO could help you obtain organic visibility.
- Quora
With an authority score of 79 and 900 million+ visits a month, Quora is another useful social network for SEO. People use the website to share information and provide answers to common questions across a variety of topics. In many search results where people are asking a question, results from Quora also tend to show up. This makes it the perfect social media platform to leverage for your SEO efforts.
Given the intimate relationship between SEO and social media, the two must work in tandem. This would entail developing a robust content strategy in which you routinely create high-quality content on your website and share it on social media. Furthermore, your social strategy should focus on increasing link clicks and boosting traffic to your website.
