The ice-cream experiment
In a famous blog post, AK Kohn investigated whether social signals cause higher SEO rankings, or just correlate with them. He used the example of ice cream scoops. The chart below would seem to indicate that increases in ice cream sales are caused by people wearing fewer clothes!
5 Ways to Maximize SEO and Social Media
The cause for this is the warm weather. The telemarketing list ice cream sales and clothes are just correlated.
But, what do ice cream sales have to do with social media and SEO? When you have social shares, you then get more social impressions or views. Some of these impressions might be social content creators, who then link to or mention your site, resulting in a higher SEO ranking.
Suppose you write a blog and 100 people tweet about it. As a result, 10,000 more people then view your blog. That’s an impressive reach! However, of these 10,000 people, suppose 100 are social media content creators. Some of these creators may then link to your blog. And what do quality backlinks lead to? Higher SEO rankings!
5 Ways to Maximize SEO and Social Media
So, even though Google doesn’t recognize tweets and shares, it does recognize the backlinks that result from those shares. Also, don’t forget that your social media profiles do turn up on SERPs!
Using social media to gain backlinks
What does all this complicated history tell us about social signals today?
Social signals matter: Content that gets shared a lot gets seen a lot.
Social signals lead to backlinks: Content that is seen by influential social media creators leads to backlinks.
Backlinks improve SEO ranking: Content with more backlinks ranks higher on Google.
It is the backlinks, not the social signals, that improve SEO ranking. Building the right following, which includes creators, has a significant impact on the number of backlinks you can expect to develop via social media.
The best way to get backlinks (hopefully of high-quality) is to:
Build link-worthy content that informs. This includes guides, blog posts, and topic clusters that attract links naturally.
Build a social media following on channels to promote link-worthy content.
Links from social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on) tend not to directly influence SEO but can indirectly benefit it. Your content will get more exposure and re-shares, and some of those people, such as journalists, bloggers, and influencers, may pick up your content and link to it from their sites
Promote content through email, push notifications to subscribers, and social media.
Outreach content to key influencers.
Research competitors’ backlinks using a tool like Ubersuggest.
How to integrate SEO and social media
As with any SEO or social media strategy, content is a key element of how successful your overall strategy is going to be.
Finding the sweet spot
The sweet spot is where your SEO, content marketing, and social media strategies come together to complement each other.