The 3 Roles Social Media Plays in SEO

 SEO is about growing organically, and to develop an effective, organic online marketing plan, it's important to not only look at SEO, but content marketing and social media, too.

The algorithm of SEO is constantly changing. Social content is being consumed at an alarming rate and it is increasing day after day. As people are continuously turning to social media platforms to search and interact, it becomes important for businesses and brand agencies to improve their design thinking, presence and especially content.

Social media is crucial for growing a successful business presence online. And equally essential is SEO. However, there's something else which most people miss: how SEO and social media marketing are closely linked. That or they get clouded by misconceptions and popular myths. So how is social media marketing connected to SEO? Does posting to various social channels improve the business' ranking? Is it not possible to fetch a rank without it?

Let's explore some roles that social media plays in SEO.

1. Social Media Channels are nothing but search engines.

Treating social platforms like search engines is the best way forward. That way, the likelihood of increasing discoverability and rank is more. The idea is to be where the potential customers are, presenting them with the information, results and content that they are specifically looking for.

That said, it's important to mention that the search visibility is not considerably improved by the information presented in the social media page. Social profiles could help users in fetching information; however, it is done indirectly. When Google assesses the local rank of a certain page and provides information, it takes does so through an external network of third-party sites and directories. These directories gather their information from multiple web sources, such as the social platform of a business. Due to this, filling up the complete information in social profiles can give a business an advantage with respect to visibility and accuracy in online listings.

2. What are Social Signals?

This is another category where misinterpretations run galore. Many believe that if an article is shared several times, then its rank is improved on Google. But it's not so. Social signals are not about the popularity of a piece of information - i.e. the number of times users on social platforms share it from their own feed, but it's about the number of users who share the piece from the business' on-site page using the social share buttons. This is how Google can measure the rankings. However, the quality of content, the business' authority and inbound links all play a more crucial role in deciding a page's rankings.

3. Get more visibility and inbound links

This is possibly the best and most value method by which it can help a business' SEO. As long as they are earned naturally, inbound links are probably the most dependable authority builders in the world of SEO. But often it gets difficult to earn them unless they're built directly with guest posts or with some other method. A sure-fire way to grow the number of inbound links a website receives is to increase the number of people who encounter its content. Yes, it's that simple. Provided the quality of content is excellent on the website and people link to this page as a result, increasing the audience by a substantial amount will earn the website at least 10 brand-new inbound links. And all of these would be natural, derived from different sources.