Does Organic Social Have an Effect on SEO?

A robust digital marketing campaign consists of several elements, such as SEO, PPC, paid social, and organic social, which work together to accomplish important business objectives. That being said, some thought leaders in the digital marketing landscape restrict SEO to a box by itself. In these cases, SEO is limited to its traditional elements such as meta tags, keywords, backlinks, and site architecture. However, the idea of conducting SEO initiatives in a vacuum brings the following question to mind: “Where does the interconnected nature of digital marketing come into play with SEO?” One place it comes into play can be found in the relationship between organic social and SEO.

SEO and organic social are similar in their focus on generating organic, “free” traffic to online assets. However, what other connections do SEO and organic social have? How exactly do they work together? Are they tied to each other at all, or are they inextricably linked? Are there direct correlations between the performance of SEO and organic social? Here are some of the benefits that a robust organic social media strategy can bring to your business’s SEO initiatives.

Enhanced Backlink Profile & Increased Organic Traffic

Building up an engaging social media strategy can be a low-risk, high-reward way to get more traffic to specific pages on your site. This is especially true if these pages on your site feature written or visual content that provides value to your audience. Whether your priority is to drive users to the site’s homepage or to direct users to a blog post or service page, increasing the organic traffic and your site and getting content in front of a wider audience is always a good idea.

However, it’s important to remember that link building is a huge part of any SEO campaign. Targeted link building is all about getting noticed by the right people for your quality content, so it can often require hours of correspondence with content writers and website administrators. Consider your organic social strategy, with its untapped reach and interactive nature, as a useful resource in your larger link building process. Earning visibility for your site’s content through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other channels can do wonders in getting your content in front of writers, bloggers, and influencers who’ll gladly link to your site from all across the web.

The more shares your article or blog post gets on social media, the more chances you have of getting a backlink from a site that came across your content on their own. Including statistics, graphs, and powerful quotes in the web content you share to social media can make it even more shareable, thus generating exposure for your article and increasing the likelihood of getting links built to your site. As long as you publish valuable, highly-shareable content, there are always going to be strangers out there that are ready and willing to link to it from their blog or website.

Leverage Existing Branded Search Results

Search queries that include a business or organization’s brand name are called “branded searches”. When a user on Google and Bing searches your brand name, there are patterns and trends that tend to inform the results that appear. It’s important to know that a brand’s social media pages are almost always a part of branded search results. These social media accounts often lie on the first page of results, thus taking up valuable prime real estate on the page that appears when users search your brand name. Brands that are present on Twitter even enjoy branded search results that feature individual tweets on the first page of results.

Understand that sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have high domain authority and will continue to dominate the first page of branded search results whether your social media accounts are fully-fleshed out or not. With this context, it becomes clear that posting engaging content on social media is vital to maximizing the potential of your branded search results. Remember, potential customers who search your brand or company name on Google will see, assess, and judge your social media presence for what it is, whether they follow you and interact with your posts or not. A solid, impressive organic social strategy can push users further along the buyer’s journey while a poor social media presence can negatively affect your business.

Insights into Content Strategy & Performance

Building up more and more organic traffic to your site through organic social can be seen as an end-all-be-all. More people are engaging with the content you’ve worked so hard to produce. However, consider the information that this newfound traffic could reveal about your site: the pages with content users respond positively too, the pages with high bounce rates, the pages that lead users to convert on.

Whether your site has sufficient traffic already or you could benefit from more, generating more site visits through organic social media can be valuable for testing purposes. Increased traffic to your site can shine light on the content strategy you’re implementing and ways in which it can be improved. If you’ve been sharing pages or posts to social media, head over to Google Analytics and take a look at the ways users are responding to the site once they arrive. Consider narrowing the data set down to users referred from specific platforms for an even deeper look at a post’s resonance.

These insights derived from social media engagement and on-site behavior can provide us with the information we need to make adjustments to the existing content strategy. If these adjustments are fine-tuned with keyword research and competitor research, updates to content strategy can be drastically more effective in reaching SEO goals and earning more conversions per month.

Conclusion

The relationship between SEO and organic social can be a bit complex, but it’s all about the importance of garnering attention in media channels the masses are already using. Creating good impressions and reaching more individuals is a positive for your business and its reputation. It just so happens that this attention can increase the number of backlinks to your site and provide insight into which parts of your site are resonating with users from different platforms. If you aren’t currently doing so, share your site’s content to your social media accounts and analyze the engagement and traffic that comes. The information the process could reveal might be the difference-maker in taking your SEO campaign to the next level. For help improving your website’s SEO and getting conversions, contact Geek Powered Studios today!