3 Ways to Use Social Media to Improve SEO

A few of my colleagues and I added the seminar, “Search Engine Optimization Redefined,” hosted by Insivia. One of the key takeaways from Andy Halko, Owner of Insivia (and my favorite line) was to “Get on social!” Getting on social media and creating content that people will want to share is great for SEO. Here are three ways to use social media to improve your SEO ranking!

1) How does social media impact SEO?
Key words aren’t the only factor affecting SEO with Google’s Hummingbird algorithm. With these ranking changes social media is beginning to play a major role in improving SEO.

What matters to get a higher SEO ranking?
According to Halko some of the top factors to SEO rankings are related to social media such as Google+’s, Pinterest Pins and Facebook shares, likes and comments.

Why does social media improve SEO?
Google isn’t going to give a high ranking to a company that has good things to say about themselves unless others are backing that up. Likes, shares, re-tweets, pins and +’s content receives will factor in to SEO rankings because Google wants to hear what others are saying about you.

2) What social media sites will help SEO?
Obviously Google is going to give priority to their own social networking site so if you aren’t on Google+ yet get on it! Use Google+ as another outlet for content, if people are sharing or +ing that content will backlink and improve SEO.

Another site that we were surprised was so high up on the list of factors affecting SEO was Pinterest. Pinterest doesn’t work as a social networking site for all businesses but it might be worth a try to get on Pinterest for a higher ranking as each re-pin is another backlink.

While we need to get on all social platforms Google+ hasn’t quite caught on as an active networking platform so keep focusing on the sites most people check daily like Facebook and Twitter!

3) How does content marketing improve SEO?
The old way of using content marketing to improve SEO was spamming content with key words and phrase. The new way of using content marketing to improve SEO is creating content worth sharing on social media. By creating unique and valuable content users will be will want to share this content on their social sites which leads to more backlinks and a higher SEO ranking.