Does Social Media Help Your SEO? Part 1: Posting (2019 Archive)

Recorded in July 2019 and published as part of a dated historical record. It reflects how search worked then, not current advice.

Does social media belong in SEO?

Moving on, the next part of a good SEO strategy will involve social media. I've had some big arguments with lots of other agency owners and so-called SEO gurus about the validity or the use of social in SEO. My personal view: you can't do without it. I've ranked sites at number one just through using Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn — so it has its place in SEO.

What kind of posting actually works?

How are we going to do that? You're posting — you've got posts on social. Great if you're posting; no good if you're not getting any interaction. They must be engaging.

Now, everyone's just gone "that's great, but I can't necessarily make every single social post engaging". The best bit of advice I can give you there is: make at least a few of them engaging. The reason for that is, if we can get a couple of good engaging posts, the posts that follow will get some of the benefit of the post that created a bit of conversation.

The most important thing we've got to do is add links. Add links to these posts and get people to come back to your site — that's the whole point. From an SEO perspective, if you can get people to come to your site from your social, that's going to be a winner, because we need the traffic — and the traffic will involve the keywords. These links want to have the keywords in them, and they probably want to include UTM links, so that in your Google Analytics you can see where that traffic came from and which particular campaign it came from.

Why can social traffic beat a number-one ranking?

The reason I say social is really important in SEO now is that there's so much traffic available. If there's a particular keyword being searched on Google, it'll have a volume — let's say it's a thousand. Well, if we're number one for that keyword, there might be four ads stacked above us. So even if we're number one, we're probably fifth, and a chunk of that traffic's going to the ads. You could argue you might have one of those ads running — but even at number one, you might only pick up, say, a couple of hundred clicks.

Look at social conversely: you can target exactly the audience you want to be in front of, and you might find there's a possibility to get tens of thousands of clicks. If I'm getting two hundred clicks off Google, that's great — I'm number one in SEO. But if I can get five or ten thousand clicks to come from a social campaign, that's going to give Google some really good signals that this particular keyword is getting traction. That's what we're trying to do: get people to follow links, with the keywords in them, from your social media.