Although social media is not a direct factor into your website’s ranking, there is still a correlation between social media activity and search engine optimisation.

Virality of posts

Let’s say, for example, you share a link to an article or blog from your website onto your social media channel. If this post goes viral, or gains a large amount of shares or likes, this can have an effect on how that article or blog ranks on search engines. The virality can also attract backlinks. Therefore, the search engines use the social signals from the likes, shares and backlinks and will use these in favour of your site and to push up rankings.

The power of the big social media platforms

90% of marketers use LinkedIn for lead generation. Inserting the right keywords in your profile, and strategically adding relevant search terms within your content, the LinkedIn search algorithm has the power to push your business to the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs). Facebook is the biggest social media platform, and ranks number 3 globally behind Google and YouTube for traffic. Google crawls and indexes links on Facebook, so it is a great platform to share links back to your website. Using Twitter, you can drive traffic back to your site by tweeting your content and using relevant hashtags to increase findability. The likes, retweets and replies on Twitter are strong social signals that Google will use to rank your site.