Companies ask the same question a lot these days that many SEO experts are. What is to be made of the relationship between SEO and social media? We know that there is a connection of some kind; neither one exists in a vacuum, even if Google insists that social links don’t boost your search ranking. If a link is published on social accounts, for instance, is it a credible backlink? Or let’s say a blog post goes viral on Twitter. Do those new links mean a boost in the post’s search ranking?
The Complex Relationship Between SEO and Social Media
The short answer is that opinions vary. Most SEO gurus feel that link building is best achieved through the development of original content that is shared across social media. Therefore, social networks like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter are impacting the search engines. It’s helping them to understand what websites are credible, and following that logic, social media matters, and it does affect your number of site visitors.
Others in the know feel that Facebook and Twitter are treated the same way by Google that other pages in a web index would be. Because of that, occurrences on Facebook or Twitter (like content going viral) will still be crawled and returned in search results. In other words, links on social media are probably being marked as credible backlinks.
If you look at it objectively, this means that the authority of a social account, even one that has a million followers, let’s say, doesn’t impact search rank. However, links published on social media, because they’re being marked as credible backlinks, can still influence a page’s rank.
For Irvine, CA companies, this still seems to be an unsatisfactory conclusion. How much should you be focusing on social media to try and drive traffic to your website? The best way to answer that is as follows. It’s almost beside the point to get too bogged down in what your social media platforms are doing for your website. It might be something, and it might be nothing.
What should not be discounted, however, is what social media promotion can do for your brand independently of how it is impacting your site ranking. You still need social media for the help it can give you when running a marketing campaign, and you need it to reach out to your customers and engage them directly. If it’s giving your SEO a boost, so much the better. You shouldn’t count on it, but at the end of the day, it’s possible that it might be helping you along. And if it isn’t, it’s probably best that you don’t lose any sleep over it.