There is a very intimate relationship between social media search engines. On the one hand, people are increasingly relying on social media to get all the information that they need. On the other hand, the performance of brands and other entities in the Google SERP tracker rankings show that the way businesses handle their social media pages has a direct impact on their SEO performance. Indeed, this relationship between social media and search results may be the sole reason for some businesses to perform better than others. Therefore, for you to maintain your SEO performance you need to master the following ways that social media affects SEO.

1. Social media and traffic

It is possible to use social media sharing and engagement activities to drive traffic to your site. In practice, social media platforms are fertile hunting grounds for potential clients. If you keep sharing your content on them, there are the chances that some users may engage with the content and decide to visit your site. In such a case, social media sites act as reliable sources of traffic to your website, which, in turn, builds your ranking in search engine results.

2. Social media and link building

The kind of backlinks that you have is one of the most critical factors that determine your SEO performance. If you have many low-quality backlinks, you may not get a higher rating than a site which has few but high-quality ones. Thus, you should always aim at getting credible backlinks to your site. To do this, you can use social media platforms to hunt for sites that you would like the owners to link back to yours. You can do this by spending time on social media and reading some of the content that owners of the sites that you target post on the platforms.

3. Search engine results include social media activity

If you search for the name of a business or even person, the chances are that out of the first few results that you will get, there shall be feeds related to the social media activity of the person. Currently, search engines are factoring in returns from social media activities in the results that they give for search queries. In other words, what you do on social media has a direct impact on the way search engines portray you. If you have positive and appealing engagements on social media, then these returns will appear in search results and enhance the perception of your audience towards you.

4. Social media profiles influence ranking

If your company has a complete profile on leading social media sites, then this may boost its performance in search results. Moreover, the profile pages need to be updated regularly to help improve the SEO performance of the firm. When people search for firms and get returns that include their social media profiles, they tend to consider the firms more credible than those which do not have social media profiles. Therefore, you need to keep your profile active for you to benefit from this complicated relationship and improve your rankings.

5. Social media content drives engagement

You may not necessarily create additional content for your social media pages. However, if you optimize what you already have on your site, you can dramatically improve the level of engagement that people have with your content. For example, when people read about your posts on social media, they may show that they engage with it and this may boost conversions. Moreover, such essential levels of engagement show that you have relevant content. Given that search spiders look at the relevance of your content, it follows that having useful content helps to boost your SEO performance.

6. Social media and local searches

You can rank highly in searches when people deliberately look up for services that are near them. If you have a very active social media presence, then you can have high chances of ranking very highly in local searches. This is the case because when you have many followers on your social media pages and you use content that has relevant keywords, then search engines tend to rank you highly.

In conclusion, social media will continue to influence the way leading search engines rank results. If you focus on engaging your audience on social media pages, then you increase the chances of getting ranked highly in leading search engines.