The Impact of Social Media on SEO Introduction Social media is the buzz word today. Businesses both and new are jumping on this social media bandwagon to capitalise on market research through increased traffic and footfalls. It undoubtedly has a huge impact on your business irrespective of the size. But have you ever wondered if SEO or also otherwise known as search engines optimization have an impact on your business via the social media. SEO is typically associated with content and web page rankings, but social media adds a whole new dimension to it.
Impact of SEO on Social Media Though SEO and its impact on social media may not be direct in terms of search ranking, it nevertheless provides a mileage when you are working with SEO through increased reach and stronger online presence, branding and marketing, and a much better content distribution that reaches a far wider market. When considering a good digital strategy combined with SEO strategy, it is critical to include the social media needs and ensure that it is well integrated in your overall development plans. The debate between the impact of SEO on social media is much
debated since there has been immense speculations about whether top search engines like Google use social media pages to determine the page ranking.
While at one time, they did mention that social media was used to rank pages, yet at another time, they denied it. Moreover, their strategies for page ranking is kept tightly under wraps making it hard to determine the logic. Irrespective of these arguments, there has been a clear paradigm shift in the way search engines are retrieving results. It is really hard to ignore social networks that have burgeoned in size at a massive scale and massive pace. The numbers are only growing. Facebook pages and Twitter pages for example, seem to have made their presence felt in Google’s results. In a controlled test that was carried out to determine the correlation between Social media and SEO, the results indicated that the relationship was indirect, however, it also showed that content that has a good standing in social media will understandably get more backlinks, which in turn boosts the search results.
Social media channels such as YouTube, Instagram, Facebook are as much or even more popular as Google. There are immense visuals, plethora of information that is available at your fingertips today. Social profiles have an important reach as well since there is an element of personal touch that is integrated as part of the social engagement and customer reach. Instagram is immensely popular because of its visual reach. You can upload demos, fun videos, pictures which give a realistic touch and help potential customers get interested in your products. This visibility along with keywords has an influence in the way a business is positioned in the search results. As much as Google likes to deny the use of social media in its rankings, it is impossible to ignore it permanently since the impact is way too huge. If not now, then in the future, it has the potential to become a reality.