Can search engines use metrics from social media to determine to evaluate the authority of a site? Does social media affect the rankings of a website? These are some of the questions SEO professionals, webmasters, web owners, and bloggers ask before developing an SEO strategy.
In the past, organizations were active in engaging their customers in social media, but they ignored data from it. Today, things have significantly changed. Data from social media cannot be overlooked since it helps in analysing the success of a digital marketing strategy, products’ performance, client behaviour, and most importantly, and competitors.
Brands are capitalizing on analysing social media performance, and you will need to keep yourself in the loop so that you can keep up with the ever-growing competition.
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Social signals – twitter followers and retweets, Facebook shares, likes, comments, and pins according to critics do not in any way affect page rankings. Therefore, according to them, analysing social media performance is a total waste of time.
However, there is a different side of the story. It is a known fact that Google partly relies on Facebook and Twitter to find new content. Therefore, the tweets, retweets, shares, and likes your content gets will affect the search engine’s indexing process. When the content is indexed fast, it means it will gain more organic traffic than that of your competitors.
What does this mean?
Simply put, analysing social media performance is essential in boosting a sit page rank since it enables you to discover ways to increase social signals on your content. When you do this, Google will swiftly index your site, and it will appear among the top when users search for particular keywords. Tools such as the social media share count can help you big-time in your endeavours.
Link building is one of the oldest essentials that search engines use to rank websites. Previously, even the weakest links resulted in better rankings. Not anymore! Today, you need to build quality backlinks if your goal is to outrank your competitors.
Social media sites have built-in authority, which makes them great platforms to develop top-quality links that you need to boost your site page rank. Therefore, when you post content in social media, the metric you get will assist you in gauging the effect of the backlinks you are using, and whether or not they are doing better than those of your competitors. If not, you will be able to build stronger backlinks that will have a significant impact on your page rankings.
With dominant search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo, credibility cannot be overlooked. Developing social media influence is one way of creating your site’s credibility; therefore you should now focus on it more than ever before.
The number of people following you on social media, their authority, the likes, and comments your content gets are determinants of your authority.
When analysing your site’s performance, determine whether you have any high-influence users following you. If not, endeavour to have some, since it has been proven that their reactions to your content can impact a site’s page ranking.
The benefits that come in handy with analysing social media performance relating to boosting a site page ranking cannot be snubbed.
Before you ignore social media metrics, remember that those URLs that rank well on search engines have more outstanding social signals than those than those that don’t. If your content doesn’t receive lots of likes, retweets, and shares, you need to restructure your social media marketing strategy. These signals are capable of raising brand awareness, enhancing the performance of your domain, and most importantly, driving massive free traffic to your site (who doesn’t love that)?
The biggest mistake you can do as a web owner is to analyse social media performance and leave it at that. It will not be of much help. Even if you notice that your content is garnering great social signals, do not forget that search engines keep on updating their algorithms. For this reason, Keep yourself up-to-date with the latest information, develop quality and valuable content, and you will establish a strong social presence on social media that will in-turn boost your on-page SEO.