18. Social Media and SEO
There have been a lot of speculations whether and to which extent is SEO affected by social media. Search engines updates that have been announced in the previous years have introduced social media signals as an important metric for determining relevance, which affects the search results visible to the users. Social signals are also seen as a way to fight spam, as they would account for reliability of the website in question.
About SEO
Search engine optimization is a process of applying different techniques in the purpose of optimizing a website and making it more user and search engine friendly. Various actions are included in this process, such as optimization of content and images, link building, etc.
Search engines display the search results in a certain order, which is determined by a special algorithm designed to show the most relevant results first. Besides being the most relevant, the results should also provide quality content that can really be helpful to the users. According to the studies related to the search results, the highest the website is ranked in the search result, the most likely will users click and visit that website. This means that the first result gets the most clicks. According to various data from 30% to 50% of clicks go to the first result in the search engine list of the results. The second and the third ranked also get attention, but in a significantly lower percent, that can range between 15 and 30%. The percentage of clicks lowers down the search result page, and the lowest results usually get less than 5% of clicks. Hardly any user goes to the other pages of the search results, as most of them will only scan through the results visible on the first page.
Having in mind this, you should understand how ranking at the top of the search results is important for your business. If you want to get people to visit your website, you have to be ranked as high as possible, and the goal of search engine optimization is to help with this task.
Increase ranking in the search results
Search engines use various metrics in this algorithm which ultimately improve your chances of being ranked as high as possible. Due to importance of social media, social signals were implemented in the search engine algorithms, which affect ranking. This means that search engines take into account the popularity of a link or a website on social networks as one of the factors that influences ranking. The more popular the website is on social media, the more significance will it hold in the search engines results.
This is one of the reasons why companies choose to invest in social media. Having a popular social media account can help you increase ranking as your content will be associated with a popular social media account, which will increase the credibility and value of that content.
Increase traffic
There is no doubt that social networks can significantly increase the amount of traffic on your website or blog. Naturally, it all comes down to how popular your social media accounts are. Having thousand of social followers, you are more likely to increase click-through rate. In this case, sharing links on social networks will have a positive influence on the traffic.
Besides direct sharing, social media allows users to share your content on their personal profiles, which additionally increase traffic to your blog.
Increasing traffic will have positive influence on your website’s performance, as the content will be considered popular and of high-quality, which means that the search engines are more likely to include your website in the search results. Besides improving SEO, increasing traffic directly helps you with other goals of your company, such as getting emails, by asking people to sign up for a newsletter, or by converting the visitors into the buyers, through the possibility of online purchase. In any case, the increase in traffic will result in multiple benefits for your company.
Social media and SEO
Apart from the importance of social signals as a factor that affects ranking, social network results are often displayed in the search results. So if you type the name of a certain brand or company in the search engine, you will usually see some of the social networking accounts of that brand or company. In some cases, it is even possible that the users are more likely to find a Facebook page or any other social network profile than to find your website.
Since social networks are the part of online environment where users feel comfortable, familiar with all of the options and features, it will be extremely beneficial for you to join them in this kind of environment. When conducting a search using a search engines some users are more likely to visit the social media account than to visit the website of a company, only because they enjoy using a particular social network.