For businesses that thrive on SEO as their main organic marketing source, social media often takes a backseat. But marketers often feel the pressure to choose social media over SEO due to its potentially quick results.
So should you continue prioritising SEO or start focusing on social media?
Here’s some good news for you: it’s not an either-or choice. Instead, you can incorporate social media in your off-page SEO strategy and use it to strengthen your SEO efforts.
Social media can help SEO more than you think
Let’s take a step back. Why do we think in terms of “social media vs. SEO”? It’s mainly for two reasons:
We (rightly) believe that SEO and social media are totally different games, each with its own rules and requirements.
We (wrongly) assume that they don’t relate to each other, except as two separate wings of organic marketing.
We assume the above because Google has repeatedly claimed that social signals don’t impact search rankings.
Google isn’t usually a trustworthy source for SEO guidance, but this claim holds up. Even recent algorithm leaks, which debunked several of Google’s claims, didn’t indicate social signals as ranking factors.
This has led many to think that social media cannot fit into an SEO-centered organic strategy. We recognise the benefits of social media for marketing in general, but we don’t see how it can support SEO.
However, although social signals are not a Google ranking factor, they support SEO efforts by indirectly (but effectively) contributing to important ranking factors.
Here’s how your social media activity helps with SEO:
Improves brand awareness → contributing to branded search
Gets traffic to your website → contributing to visitor engagement
Ranks on SERPs with your social posts → more ranking opportunities, yay!
Gets organic backlinks → improving your natural backlink profile
Establishes Trustworthiness → contributing to the E-E-A-T
5 ways social media backs up your SEO efforts
Any long-term SEO strategy consists of two parts: the on-page and off-page strategy.
Off-page SEO focuses on enhancing ranking signals from external sources. This mostly includes acquiring backlinks from other reputable sites. But it also involves building online reputation and brand awareness that can boost your website up in the Search Engine Results Pages, or SERPs for short.
This is where social media comes into play. Here are 5 ways it strengthens your SEO efforts:
1. Increases brand awareness & online reputation
Regular social media activity can improve brand recognition and build a strong online reputation. If your brand appears on people’s feeds regularly with a consistent brand voice, they’ll start to recognise it.
There are two ways this influences your SEO factors:
Branded Search
When someone searches for your business by name, that’s called a branded search. Branded search is a healthy ranking factor that signals the relevance and demand of your brand.
Naturally, people only search for brands they know or have heard about. And most people today discover brands on social media. Social media activity is an effective way to introduce your brand to your target audience and leave an impression.
If they know what solutions you offer from your social posts, they’ll be primed to search for your brand the next time they need that solution, increasing the branded search ratio.
Higher Click-Through Rate
Brand recognition can lead to more clicks on your organically-ranked search result.
When users search for a query and your brand shows up, those familiar with it from social media are more likely to choose your link over others. This improves the click-through rate, which is an important ranking factor.
2. Gets more traffic to the website
User engagement can strongly impact your SEO efforts. Positive engagement metrics such as bounce rate, time spent on page, and pages per session, can help strengthen your organic rankings.
But to improve these metrics, you need consistent traffic in the first place. The more traffic your site gets, the better you can optimise for on-page user engagement to rank higher.
This is where social media works as a back-up traffic source. You can get a stream of visitors to your site by sharing content and showing up on social channels.
Moreover, if your website isn’t currently ranking for the queries you want, you need traffic from other sources to get engagement. Social media can effectively generate engagement until your SEO efforts fully take off.
So whether you have a new website or one that already ranks, getting traffic from social media can consolidate your SEO efforts.
3. Gets you organic backlinks
Most businesses rely on an active link-building strategy, which involves reaching out to relevant publishers or buying links. Yes, it is a faster and reliable way of gaining backlinks initially, but it is not enough in the long-term.
For a stronger and natural backlink profile, active link-building should be supplemented with passive link-building, which means attracting organic links to your content.
You can do this by:
Creating useful and valuable content (obviously!)
Sharing and promoting it on your social media channels
Sharing content across your social channels can help you attract a wider range of readers, generating public interest. And if the content resonates, some of your readers will naturally link to it, earning you completely organic backlinks.
4. Social profiles & posts can also rank
We usually forget that social media posts and profiles can also rank on search results. For a brand aiming for higher search impressions, having an active social media presence opens up additional ranking opportunities.
The most common social posts we see on the SERPs belong to LinkedIn, X, and YouTube. So your social media strategy for these platforms can help you capture organic space on the SERP.
Beyond traditional results, these profiles and posts also feature in knowledge panels, video carousels, and X cards.
Moreover, having your social profiles ranked for branded keywords builds trust with your audience, which leads to the next point.
5. Trustworthiness – The “T” of the E-E-A-T
Experience-Expertise-Authoritativeness-Trustworthiness, the four elements of Google’s quality guidelines. Although E-E-A-T is not an algorithmic ranking factor, it is a quality signal based on how users perceive your site’s credibility and reliability.
Trustworthiness means whether people believe your business is reliable and worth engaging with. And one of the easiest ways to establish this trust is through a strong social media presence.
Let’s imagine you need a home garden design service.
You find two businesses through a Google search and visit their homepage. Both offer similar services at the same prices.
The first one has an amazing website and seems pretty credible. However, they have a bare Instagram account that hasn’t posted in months, and their LinkedIn page looks abandoned. No recent activity, no comments, no updates.
The second one has an equally optimised website. But they also have an active Instagram profile with project photos and regular updates about their work. They also publicly respond to comments. You can see the smiling pictures of actual people behind the service.
Which one would you trust?
It’s a no-brainer. Businesses active on the socials feel more transparent, trustworthy, and credible. Having an active social media presence builds the trust you need to bolster organic rankings.
Incorporate social media into your SEO strategy
A truly rewarding SEO strategy cannot remain divorced from other organic channels, especially social media. SEO campaigns that integrate social media channels can be more resilient in the face of uncertainty.
Moreover, social media plays an even greater role in SEO for local business success and B2C brands. Consumers increasingly trust businesses that are transparent about their location and actively engage on social channels.
Finally, SEO is not a fixed game. We don’t know much about how internet searches will evolve. Currently, Google doesn’t factor social signals into rankings, but Bing does. Google may eventually decide to follow suit.
Even if it doesn’t, users are becoming less reliant on Google with time. As more users search directly on social platforms and try other modes for search (e.g. AI-powered search tools), the importance of social media for SEO will continue to grow.
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