Let's be clear; there is no direct connection between social media presence and where your business ranks on Google listings. The reason for this is that if Google were to use social media shares and followers as an influencing factor in search engine rankings, it would be too easy for companies to cheat the system and find a way to raise the listings artificially.
That, however, does not mean that there isn’t any correlation at all. If you hire a local SEO agency to manage your digital marketing, they will likely have a social media strategy because a healthy and active social media presence improves your chances of performing well in the search engines.
The indirect relationship between social media and SEO is most notable through the selective acquisition of followers, authority-building through content, and by amplifying your presence.
Be Selective with Your Followers
Many companies fall into the trap of thinking that buying followers will boost their prominence under the false assumption that a large number of followers equals more business. The reality, however, is that obtaining social media followers mirrors the same principle as content creation – quality beats quantity.
What’s the point of having 10,000 followers if only a few dozen are actually potential clients? There’s no sense in inefficiently wasting resources on a broad net when appealing to a niche market will provide a higher conversion rate.
When looking for followers, look at groups and forums frequented by experts in your field and even your competitors. Think about narrowing your categories using hashtags – if you are selling shoes for endurance running, you'll have a better chance of finding your desired client-base using a hashtag like #crosscountry, rather than something much broader like #shoes.
Building Authority Through Content
Now that you have your followers, it’s time to give them something to engage with.
Content thrives in social media because it doubles as a distributor. Instead of creating a blog and putting it on a website with enough keywords to hope someone will read it at some point, spreading it to your followers guarantees a certain level of readership. If you’ve done a good job curating your followers, you have an audience that is guaranteed to want to engage with what you have to say.
Creating content is not purely a promotional tool; it should be done with the intent to educate. Writing blogs and creating media should be done to make yourself a reliable source of information for your readers. When your followers come to you as a trusted source of knowledge and authority on a subject, you will achieve a level of brand loyalty that ensures you will be the first thing in your customer’s mind when they recommend a business that provides your service. But that's at just at the personal level, the relationship between content distribution and social media presence has a more practical effect in your local SEO.
Amplifying Your Presence Through Content in Social Media
You might be reading this and asking yourself; how does creating quality content and sharing in social media improve my local SEO agency? The answer is exposure.
If you publish and distribute the right type of social media content, the effects on your company’s SEO can be substantial. As it turns out, your social media posts can be crawled by search engines like google and get indexed as a result. This means that if your content is relevant and being clicked regularly by your followers, your social media profiles will find their way higher and higher on search engine queries. If your content garners a lot of attention on Facebook or Twitter, you will find that it will get indexed much quicker.
The formula is simple; create quality content your follower-base wants to engage with and post regularly – the more readers and viewers you have, the higher your social media pages will rise for your particular product niche.
Finally, Measure Your Presence
You now have the basics to improve your SEO with the use of social media. Once you've learned how to select your followers, establish authority, and amplify your presence in your field through the creation and distribution of content, it's essential to keep track of your performance. Having access to and keeping track of your traffic analytics allows you to isolate what works and what doesn’t, giving you a valuable tool to shape your online presence.
You might want to consider bringing in a highly regarded local SEO agency to help you with this effort. With or without help, however, learning to leverage your social media presence to improve your search engine rankings is an essential skill for a useful business model.