Social media and SEO. Social shares, social backlinks – what do they do for your website, if anything? There’s always been a fair amount of controversy over whether social media influences your site credibility and search engine rank. I’ve got answers for you, and you’re going to want to watch the video below.

How does social media influence your site rank?

In this SEO video, we’re going to talk about social media and how social media can affect your search engine site rank, whether directly or indirectly.

First, some definitions: Ranking refers to the process search engines use to determine where and when a particular piece of content should appear on a search engine results page (SERP). Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing the unpaid (AKA ‘organic’ or ‘earned’) online visibility of a website on SERPs.

Social media and the search engine algorithms – a brief history 🙂

If you take a look back several years, search engine algorithms did use social media engagement, likes, and shares as an official part of the algorithm – it was one of the factors they used to determine your site rank directly. But of course, social media changes quickly, and some platforms are all the rage today, but gone tomorrow (hello, MySpace?).

So, smartly, top search engines reduced the amount of influence and site credibility that depended directly on social media. They realized it wouldn’t be wise to hang their proverbial ‘site credibility ranking hats’ on social media metrics over which they had no control and that were evolving rapidly.

In 2019, does social share or other engagement directly influence site ranking? Today, Google and Bing have different answers on this, as I discuss in the video. So, what’s a strategic business or brand to do?

Regardless, you all know that my approach is about evergreen practices that will win no matter what the algorithms do.

Social media can be an incredibly important part of a good SEO strategy.

Search engines will always take a few key things into account when determining your site rank. Watch this video to get the details on how to leverage social media in your SEO strategy:

https://www.facebook.com/DrMStiegler/videos/2262495087147561/

Social media does not have any direct influence on SEO or site rank

Let’s recap about what doesn’t have any direct bearing on your website rank.

Social media followers.
Your selection of social media platform.
Posting links on your social media platforms.
Other people sharing your content on a social media platform (well, this might, but it has less authority than third party backlinks. If you don’t know what backlinks are, you absolutely need to subscribe to my facebook page or blog, so we can get you up to speed! You’re probably a great candidate for the Branding Prescription course – check it out!)

But, social media can have HUGE indirect influence on SEO or site rank

What we do know that can indirectly help you is that some platforms have high authority with these search engines. Meaning these search engines know that these specific websites offer up high quality, trusted content that is relevant to the keywords people are searching for.

For example, if you share a link on Facebook and someone shares it, and someone else sees it and chooses to use it as a reference on their own blog, and that content is coming from a high-quality site then it carries a lot of weight in terms of ranking. The actual Facebook post, and the related shares of the post with the link carry little authority.

The more the content is shared and clicked on the more it can help you as long as you have a high-quality site that offers valuable content and that is appropriately structured for SEO. As I’ve mentioned before, you can build a brand without a website with these strategies. But if you’re serious, I recommend a website!

So, is social media going to help you rank high on Google? No. However, it’s so crucial to the overall strategy because you are creating fantastic content that is relevant and important and will get seen and shared. Content that is shared on social media to like-minded people who are genuinely interested and therefore will click back to your site to read more.