There can sometimes be a fine line between where social media stops, and SEO begins because when social media is done right, it can drive traffic and increase your online sales.

Social media has, for the last couple of years played a huge part in search engine optimisation and how your business will rank in Google Search. Google does pay attention to social interactions such as likes, retweets, shares and +1’s when deciding on your businesses ranking. Social media done right does drive traffic… and here’s how.

How Does Social Media Drive Traffic?

Google’s Social Integration with Twitter

Google have recently announced their partnership with Twitter, meaning that Tweets will show up in Google Search based on a keyword search query. Google is now acting as an independent filing system for content online and will send thousands of google bots to crawl and index content in a very effective way. Twitter is essentially helping Google discover new content.

Fine tuning social efforts for SEO

There are so many great tools you can use to measure your social media efforts so that you can analyse and fine tune for the future.

Searchmetrics said the following;

“Since search engines now calculate social relevance and performance across the web, this information empowers your organization to make meaningful adjustments to its social strategies.”

Indirect Link Building

Social media is a great way to indirectly build links. For example, I will share my latest blogs on social media with my online community who will then retweet and share it with their community. This then leads to a potential client or me writing content for a credible website.

This does happen on a consistent basis and although social media sharing does not directly boost my overall SEO URL ranking, it does have an indirect benefit that’s just as important as it build true authority online.

Social Media Referrals

Social media can be a great way for businesses to find referral partners. Having an active social media following and consistently updating your blog will naturally attract more visitors to your website. Whilst Google doesn’t necessarily know that the traffic is coming from social media, it will see a spike in traffic which they will like, enhancing your authority and give Google a good reason to move you closer to a page one ranking.

Social Profile Rankings

It is so important from an SEO perspective that you claim all of your social profile and make sure they are consistent with your website branding. If you run a Google search on any brand, you will see that their Facebook page, along with other social profiles show up on the first page of Google Search.

Understanding that Social and SEO Go Hand-in-Hand

Try not to get caught up in a debate over the difference between social media and SEO because most of the time, whilst the relationship is indirect, it is there and the more you focus on staying consistent online and building a strong social media following, the better your SEO will improve naturally.

Social media done right, can drive a lot of traffic to your website, and increase your search ranking on Google.

If you are looking at ways to increase your sales around Christmas time through the use of social media and search engine optimisation, sign up for my complimentary webinar here.