How Social Media Helps SEO
Most people know the importance of being active on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Some might think that social media platforms are independent entities rather than something that actually has the potential to impact the rest of their digital marketing efforts. The fact is that social media provides many great benefits on its own but also in other marketing efforts, including SEO.
The first reason for a lot of people to make a tweet about an article they just published is exposure, but they are looking for personal rewards and individual growth by sharing content on social media instead of thinking of the long-term benefits. The truth is, that the majority of the people don't understand how things work and are for that reason incapable to fully realize the immense impact they can have by simply retweeting someone’s article.
However, understanding the relationship between social media and SEO can be difficult. Especially for people who've never looked for anything but short-term rewards, which in fact is what most people are indeed looking for. There's no question about it, and also no shame in doing that.
There is more to Twitter than you might have thought though. Of all the different social media platforms out there, Twitter is the one that is the most beneficial in terms of SEO.
One could debate or argue for days, months and years whether social media affects SEO or not, but regardless of what some people might say- and others believe, the short answer is:
- Yes. social media affects SEO in various ways.
That being said, it is not a direct ranking factor, but it is beneficial to SEO indirectly for various reasons. Widening your reach and overall marketing strategy for instance. Twitter goes beyond that though, due to the important role they got back in 2015, when they partnered up with Google.
The outcome of that partnership is, amongst other things, that Google has access to the Twitter stream so that it can index tweets in its search results.
Long story short, Twitter is an invaluable platform and you can- and should utilize it for SEO purposes, even though you might use it primarily for quick bursts of traffic or short-term rewards.
How To Utilize Twitter
@khaleelkazi and @leofinance does an amazing job in terms of their Twitter presence, and even though Google might not look at social signals as direct ranking factors, other search engines like Bing value social signals a lot and I will show you some examples later on.
All the activity on Twitter is a superb example of brand building and it makes them (LeoFinance) come off as trustwhorty and the credibility raises due to all the awesome updates and new releases. Being active is essential for growth. With all the tweets they make and all the retweets they get over time, they also get more exposure, becomes more known and it gives them access to a much wider audience than by just making a post on LeoFinance.
- It's literally "brand building 101", but it definitely works!
That doesn't necessarily make LeoFinance-content rank higher on search engines though, but this is part of a legitimate SEO strategy because an active and engaging presence on Twitter will help you drive traffic to your website over time.
While retweets doesn't directly boost SEO rankings, they are still an important part of the strategy because by gradually building credibility and sharing valuable content, people discovers your content. They might in turn share it on social media and/or they might mention you- or include a link to an article on their own websites.
- Those links are exactly what we are looking for.
That might be what happened with the backlink from The Washington Post we saw previously. An article about the hack of Axie Infinity for more than $600 million was published in the Washington Post, and they included a link to Axie Infinity is really expensive to start playing that has been published on LeoFinance.
Sure, they might have found the article from forexbrokr through search engines, but it definitely didn't hurt to throw around some tweets about that article on Twitter either. We never know who we will reach with our tweets, which is why it's so important to retweet LeoFinance-content at all times too. Especially content we know, or believe have potential to drive organic traffic over time.
Let's talk about two articles that pulls in tons of organic traffic to LeoFinance each month. Both of them where written and published by @finguru, who has become the "SEO-King" on LeoFinance due to the fantastic results.
- Roughly 1000 page views on each articles from Google.
- Almost 100 page views from duckduckgo.
- 34 page views from Bing.
While he has tremendous results in terms of organic traffic from search engines, we can also see that he had a good amount of people coming from Twitter as well. This is the power of social media and why it is important to retweet, like and to spread the word. Exposure.
Boost Organic Growth
When something so easy as a simple retweet can benefit us in so many different ways, I would suggest everyone to retweet and like other people's LeoFinance-content. Regardless if you upvote it or not. You don't even have to agree with it. You just have to retweet and spread the word to increase exposure.
@forexbrokr, @finguru and @bitcoinflood are some of the authors who's creating outstanding optimized content that is likely to rank on search engines. Whenever you stumble across a tweet that includes a link to one of their articles, don't hesitate. Just push that retweet & like button!
That being said, I would appreciate tweets and/or retweets for two of my recent articles (and my future publications as well). I have published them both for ranking purposes and to bring organic traffic over time, which is the purpose for most of the content I will produce in the future. Outward facing content is key to bring in outsiders, and we need to rank outward facing content for that reason.
Even though finguru’s posts are doing really-well in terms of bringing in traffic, I would still recommend people to share them on social media to get even more exposure. More importantly though, make sure to link to those articles in your future posts!