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Welcome to episode 22 of Blue Square SEO & Digital Marketing Podcasts. In this episode I talk about social media and SEO and whether social signals help SEO and search engine rankings in 2021.
Being able to get new customers, patients or clients to your business, whatever that may be is vital to success, However, in today’s world of the internet and digital communication, having Page 1 rankings in the search engines is just as important. They go hand-in-hand, a symbiotic relationship! With out either one, you probably will not have a business. As part of a digital marketing strategy, when done properly, social media marketing can have many benefits. These can include:
If you are unfamiliar with how social media marketing can impact your search rankings, listen on.
I will discuss:
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Here are a few some statistics about social media:
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Blue Square SEO and Digital Marketing Podcast. I’m your host, Paul Birkett, from Blue Square Management, and in today’s podcast I’m going to be talking about how social media impacts your search engine rankings.
INTRO
Having good search engine rankings is just as important as getting a line of customers, clients or patients into your business. If you are not familiar with how social media can impact your search rankings, listen on.
First, you have to understand what search engines, such as Google, are looking for, so you can see how social media is affecting search results. For instance, the authority of your Twitter tweets, how many thumbs up your URL receives, how many Facebook Likes and shares your URL gets and how many tweets and retweets your URL obtains.
Each and every time someone on social media mentions your local business, it helps to boost your search rankings. How large your following is also has an affect and how much engagement your social posts receive all play a role in this. Here’s an example:
Luigi’s Italian Restaurant in New York City got a tweet from a local newspaper about its delicious dishes. That tweet was then liked 400 times and retweeted 50 times. Both the newspaper’s and Luigi’s Twitter handle get activity for this. Then because Luigi’s had their URL linked to their account on Twitter, their website was able to get a higher ranking on search engines.
Engagement on social media platforms can help boost your rankings even for keywords that are otherwise difficult to rank highly for (those broad, nonspecific phrases). However, it works best with those that have low competition. So, if the keyword that is getting social media buzz is ‘Italian food’, you could end up ranking high for that keyword. Local businesses can take advantage of this because it helps them to boost their business’s search rankings for those general, yet necessary keywords.
Whenever you share content, make sure that you include low competition keywords like ‘Authentic Italian food in New York’, so when it gets social buzz, it can boost your rankings in the search engines. The more content you share from your website on social media, the better your site will rank, which means more traffic being generated for your business.
Before you begin your SEO social media campaign, you should check out how you are doing so far. There are number of tools out there that can help you do this. Both paid and free.
Ubersuggest has both a paid and free option. Just enter your competitor’s website url and click on ‘top pages’ to look at the results. The last two columns show their Facebook and Pinterest engagements. This provides a good indication how they are doing on these two social media platforms.
BuzzSummo is a paid subscription, but does have a 30 day free trial. Again, like Ubersuggest, just add your competitor’s website url or main keyword and press search. BuzzSumo then quickly finds the most shared content related to the keyword or competitor.
You can search for local keywords. For example, let’s continue with Luigi’s Italian Restaurant in New York City. Instead of searching for your competitors, search for a local keyword, such as ‘pizza new york’ or ‘italian restaurant new york’. Then create better quality content on the same subjects and share your content.
Mention is a paid social monitoring tool that allows you to add your business name (or competitor’s name) or industry keyword. When Mention finds these in its searches, it will send you email summary alerts.
You can also do this with Google Alerts, which is free,
So, you know that the more action you get on social media, the better your search ranks become. However, back in 2014, Google’s Matt Cutts said in a video that social signals, such as Facebook likes and Twitter followers, do not influence search rankings. Marketer and SEO consultants had assumed that social signals were part of Google’s algorithm as an indication of quality and trustworthiness.
However, though social may not directly affect your search engine rankings, it does influence your SEO rank.
A study by Hootsuite in 2018 tested the SEO results of articles with and without social syndication. This study showed that content with high social shares received an average 22% boost during the duration of the experiment.
Now, let us look into how exactly this works for the different social media networks:
There are other social media sites you can use, like Pinterest, StumbleUpon, Reddit, FourSquare and Digg. These are the factors that play a role in getting ranked higher using these sites:
Link building is not a new concept and is just as valuable today as it was 10 years ago. However, it has been made much easier to achieve thanks to social media networks. In the past, people would try link building using black hat tactics, like leaving spammy comments on forums and blogs. Today, you can implement link building into your social media strategy. For instance, you can include links to valuable content from your blog in the social media posts you submit.
There are many benefits that local businesses can receive from social media platforms. They can become an authority, gain a bigger following, network with influencers and boost incoming traffic using link building and organic search rankings. Social media marketing has a grand effect on the way we do business today and if you leverage it the right way, you can steadily grow the customer, client or patient base for your local business.
I hope you found this episode helpful and see you in the next Blue Square SEO and Digital Marketing podcast.
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