How Search Engine Optimisation and Social Media go hand in hand

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At a first glance, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and Social Media are two completely different platforms, but having a strong base of followers on social media can greatly increase your SEO rankings with social media marketing.

SEO rankings are constantly changing and evolving due to how a Search Engine, like Google or Bing sort and arrange your ranking. It is not just as simple as using keywords anymore, which is why having an appropriate Social Media outlet or presence will greatly benefit your business online. In 2017, social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube are very much search engines in their own right.

For example, how many times have you searched for a tutorial on YouTube first forgoing the usual Google search? A business owner can further game the internets search systems by targeting content on them.

Let’s take the popular social media site Pinterest for example; you already have your e-Commerce site up and running and you have some fantastic products you wish to market; you create your Pinterest page, either in your own personal name or in the name of your business (or both); then you simply start making ‘pins’ to your page. When consumers click on these pins, they are then linked back to your business e-Commerce store where they can carry on to look at the product that interested them and all of your other products. Taking them one step closer to buying something.

Apart from the obvious direct link from Pinterest there is also a lot of secondary effects for your business website ranking. That backlink from Pinterest to your own website will then improve your Google ranking. It does this in part by increasing the total amount of visits your website receives and, if targeting is good it will increase the time each user spends on your website, these factors all work towards a better Google search ranking. Time on page is just as important as the number of visitors you recieve, as it is a key indicator of the relevance of the search result Google has given. Using social media in this way is how you can jump start or game search engine results when you need more users and time on page to improve your Google or search ranking to further improve your rankings and income.

Furthermore, having a clear external link for people to see on your own e-Commerce web page will have people clicking on that external link to take you to your Pinterest page, where they can “follow” you or better yet, ‘Pin’ your products to their own pages for their followers to see, and in turn you have better engagement and whole new customer base which is following you and regularly clicking on your links back to your website.

It’s this cycle of engagement that works really well on your social media platform and further re-enforces your Google search rankings. You want others to follow your pages and/or social media accounts. So if you haven’t integrated a few different Social Media platforms into your own business online seo marketing strategy, you should definitely get this underway asap. The benefits are real for both your search engine rankings which will intern flow through to your business profits.