The question of whether social networks have an impact on SEO has been discussed in various groups and forums for several years.
In 2010, both Google and Bing search engines admitted to using social signals to help rank pages in their results.
Four years later, this position changed and Twitter temporarily blocked Google’s access to its social network. In 2014, Matt Cutts, Google’s former head of web spam, released a video explaining why Google can’t trust the signals sent by social networks.
Since 2014, Google has publicly denied social influence on rankings. But a lot has changed in the last 6 years. A significant change is that social networks play a much more prominent role in search engines.
Why are social networks important for our site?
The fact of the matter is that in today’s world, you need to promote your content and products on social media to succeed in online marketing, increase brand awareness and encourage users to visit your website.
More precisely, no content plan and strategy is complete without the use of social networks, because forgetting this valuable marketing channel will not only leave potential customers out of your sight, but also differentiate you from your competitors. In the words of Jay Baer:
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Social media is the fuel to ignite your content.
According to the 2013 report of Marketing Performance Institute, marketers usually use five social media to distribute content. Whether you are starting to work with social media to publish your website content or reviewing and revising existing plans, this article will be very suitable for you.
Direct effects of social networks on site SEO
A large number of SEO experts believe that social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn directly or indirectly affect your site’s SEO, and publishing content or placing a site link in it can have an acceptable effect on the site’s ranking and domain authority.
The amount of interaction of users in these social networks with the content, including visits, likes, sharing, comments, can significantly improve the amount of this effect.
Apart from this, the input you get through the links you put on social media can play an important role in improving your ranking.
Note: Some people think that the above methods are sufficient for SEO, but it is important to mention that everything that will be discussed in this content will serve as a supplement to fuel your engine. And the basic principles of SEO including technical SEO, content strategy and external SEO are still the main arms for the growth of your site.
We do use Facebook and Twitter links in web search ranking
Matt Cutts
Of course, it should be noted that a few years later, Google rejected this statement and officially stated that it does not use social networks for website ranking.
But what we have seen from social networks and its impact on site SEO in these years has made these claims a little invalid.
Strong reasons of the influence of social signal on SEO site
Website or a social network
Before social networks are an application on your mobile phone, they are a reliable site with high page authority and domain, and the outgoing links from it (especially if introduced by different profiles) will have a positive effect on your site’s SEO, whether you want it or not, but a competitive advantage. Does not have!
Credit brings credit
Suppose a doctor specializing in the field of genetics shares his latest scientific content and findings on LinkedIn or Twitter (English), and by this means, he has gained credibility and a significant number of users.
Now, this influential person with just a blog post on a website and linking to his LinkedIn account will undoubtedly use the credit he has built for himself, and this issue directly shows the effect of social signals on the ranking of the site.
Google and Twitter; good friends
According to the statistics provided by Google in 2015, Google’s intelligent robots have the ability to access Twitter data. To understand this more concretely, just search the name of a person who has a Twitter account (doesn’t need to be famous) in Google. Search to find media that someone has shared or responded to on their account!
Note: It should be noted that these strong relationships are not limited to Twitter and with the increasing use of social networks, Google’s cooperation with these emerging search engines! It is not far from the mind at all.
Note: In explaining the above, it is worth mentioning that many social networks such as Facebook or Instagram have almost become a powerful search engine and operate in parallel with Google. The fact that sometimes results from Instagram are shown to you on the Google results page is a continuous intersection of these two paths that can be looked at from different angles, and only the impact of the content or the visits of Google’s algorithms to these social networks is an incomplete claim.
I draw your attention to the significant growth of Facebook and Twitter pages in the list of Google results in 2018.
An interesting test of the effect of social signals on site SEO
In 2018, Hootsuite’s social network information analysis team conducted an experiment to check the effect of social networks on site ranking, and I will provide you with a summary of the experiment and its results.
The team categorized their website articles for testing into three main groups:
Control or control articles: 30 articles that were not advertised in any social network.
Group An articles: Thirty articles published on Twitter
Group B articles: thirty articles published on Twitter, which have been re-advertised with a specific budget.
Note: It should be noted that in order to reduce the error rate in this test, all other variables are equal as much as possible.
Testing process: Every day, two posts from group A and B are published during a two-week period and promoted in the following week. (Group B advertisements)
Indirect influence of social networks on site SEO
Increase brand awareness
If I were to define brand awareness with an example, I would ask you to name three sports shoe brands very quickly without thinking. Probably brands such as Adidas, Nike, Puma, Asics, etc. can be seen in this list. Brands that have reached the highest degree of brand awareness.
Continuing to produce appropriate content on social networks with a focus on a specific target community in the long term can differentiate your business from your competitors in terms of brand awareness and brand popularity. This will make your users remember your name immediately if they need the services you are providing, and in addition to recommending to others, they will also directly enter your website and thus increase your organic traffic. Which will ultimately help to increase the SEO of your site.
Better communication with customers
Today, many people reflect their positive or negative experiences in using a company’s product or service on social networks. If you, as a business that definitely has a valuable goal in mind, such as gaining trust and customer satisfaction, you want to maintain your relationship with customers, see them, control emotions and praise them if the user is satisfied. Do it, your presence in social networks is of great importance and will greatly help the popularity and awareness of your brand.
The best social networks to get social signal
With more than a billion active users, Facebook is one of the best social networks that you can use to publish content, interact with users, etc.
Some practical tips for an effective presence on Facebook:
- Using attractive and high-quality images (either in content production or product promotion)
- Send short messages, the detail of the content does not attract the user as much as it should in this social network.
- Regular publication of posts
- Use optimized descriptions and tags
- Consider competitive campaigns and promotional activities.
Another best social network that can bring you significant organic traffic is Twitter.
Storytelling, keeping up with today’s trends, optimal use of hashtags, etc. are some of the things that will have an impact on increasing user interaction with the page and ultimately your website.
YouTube
To distribute video content to your audience, in addition to social networks such as Instagram, which we will talk about, you can also publish it on platforms such as YouTube.
One of the best advantages of YouTube is that it is a content distribution network of Google products, and in this sense, the growth of your channel and the interaction of users with your specialized videos will have a direct impact on the SEO of the site.
Some important points about YouTube:
- Be sure to enable the embedding feature so that others can upload your video to their website.
- The videos should be concise and useful without exaggeration.
This social network is now more than just a collection for business contacts and is a complete platform for publishing specialized content.
A few important things to keep in mind about LinkedIn:
- Create a professional page for which you can use video.
- Encourage employees to join the page.
- In this social network, quality is more important than quantity.
- Make the most of user recommendations and comments, unlike other social networks, comments and criticisms are very respectful and professional in LinkedIn.
Instagram is currently the most powerful social network for sharing photos in cyberspace, and at this rate of growth, it will become an image search engine in the not-so-distant future. Considering the presence of most businesses on Instagram, having a targeted content production and publishing strategy on this social network has a significant impact on increasing user participation rates, increasing brand awareness, and also directing users to the website through the see more option that is active in the story section. is, has