Every “run of the mill” marketer knows how to engage viewers and drive web traffic through popular social media networks, but using them to influence search engine results is something many don’t understand.

One thing is for certain, correlation isn’t the same as causation. So, even though there’s a relationship between SEO and social media, its nature is uncertain.

This means there are social media strategies that can potentially boost your efforts for better search rankings, but it’s vital to understand Google’s stance before looking into them.

Can Social Media Affect SEO? Let Google tell it, NO!

At least, not openly.

The reason could be because there are so many social signals to factor. For instance, there are millions of new posts every day. Users can also falsely inflate certain metrics, such as views or follower count.

In spite of this, social media has an indirect influence over search engine results.

That’s because certain procedures can encourage your users to perform activities that directly impact optimization, such as the infamous backlinking method. Operational social marketing also shapes brand awareness, which means customers are more likely to recognize your business name in search engines.

Following this reasoning, here are a few ways you can organize your social media marketing strategy to improve your SEO:

Build and Market Praiseworthy Content

By creating and promoting high-quality marketing content, many target market supporters will deem it share-worthy and some content makers will consider it link-worthy.

This process has four parts: You build content, consumers share it, it finds the eyes of content creators (or influencers) and they develop pieces that link to it. This last part directly effects SEO.

Contemplate using maneuvers such as:

• Testing between peak and non-peak sharing times. It may seem wise to share content when the bulk of your customers are online, but our research shows that’s not always true.
• Asking for users to share your content. Tweets or post that say “Please Retweet” and “Please share” earn an average of 51% and 39% more shares, based on research by social media scientist Dan Zarrella.

But if the digital content piece itself doesn’t satisfy your user’s need for value, it likely won’t earn shares and almost surely won’t get link backs.

To craft engaging marketing content, try:

• Take advantage of on trending topics. If there’s news associated to your target market, generate good marketing content around it. Use appropriate hashtags and keywords for searchability.
• Placing links near the beginning of posts. Studying 200,000 tweets, a researcher discovered that online users are most likely to click a link if it appears a quarter of the way through the text.
• Using multimedia in your post. Facebook posts with pictures earn 53% more likes, 84% more clicks and 104% more comments than those post without, this info comes from a HubSpot study of more than 1,500 corporations.

Speak to the Audience’s Pain-Points

Your target demographic will likely gravitate to marketing content that tackles haunting niche issues, endorsing and distributing it to help each other find an answer.

Pain-points change as content makers offer solutions and industries themselves advance past them.

So, how can you always find new pain-points to speak too, keeping customers interested long enough to share and link to your brand?

Try these marketing techniques:

• Survey your customers and followers. This will take some time. Build an online survey that lists subjects and asks partakers to rank their level of struggle with each. Then, message or email your audience members about it. Their understandings will help guide your social and content tactics.
• Observe Google search intent. This is the quick and easy way. Search a keyword or term, noting the titles of the top blogs. Despite Google frequently changing its algorithm, the search engine’s objective has always been to develop user experience by ranking niche content based on factors such as relevance, backlinks and low bounce rates. So, the top-ranked blogs effectively explore issues bugging users. Base your marketing content on them.

Create Relationships

Cultivating genuine relationships with customers is one of the most active ways to influence SEO through social media.

Contemplate how many likes, shares and comments your post get in a day. There’s a good chance that a core cluster of users delivers a big portion of these engagements.

This shows that, compared to the average user, folks who you’ve made social media relationships with are more likely to:

•     Share your digital content
•     Seek you out on other social media platforms
•     Visit your website, increasing direct and referral visits
•     Link to your web pages, which in turn boost web traffic while sending favorable signals to Google

Last Thoughts About Cultivating SEO through Social Media

Google may say it doesn’t use social data when ranking pages, but these strategies show how you can indirectly affect SEO by using social media.

Start by generating engaging marketing content that meets your customer’s niche needs. Then, work to populate their social media feeds with it. Accelerate these processes by building digital relationships with customers and influencers, delivering great benefits such as more profile and website visits.

You should note; these marketing tactics are all core mechanisms of a greater overall digital marketing strategy. And keep in mind, Google regularly changes its search algorithm. It’s not farfetched that, one day, social media data will directly influence ranking.