Is social media important for small business SEO?

Does Social Media affect your business branding and sales figures?

Search Engine Optimisation is all about great content and quality back links, right? Well, not exactly. At least, not as a whole, as what the recent study of Search metrics showed. It presented the importance of social media signals to a website’s ranking and how it can help maintain a healthy on line presence to websites. The updated study also revealed that websites that are high in SERP’s has a lot of Tweets, shares, +1s and likes. However, there are still many business owners out there who confuse the relationship of SEO and social media, with some pointing out that one of them will outlive the other. But there’s no need to actually compare them as separate entities as they are both part of Internet marketing and can be made to complement each other.

As an affordable SEO consultant, I always want to explain to consumers about the differences of these two marketing strategies to small business owners. The volatility of the market itself also adds to the complexity of these techniques as social media marketing changes more often compared to other types. For instance, Google algorithm updates usually take several months, say 3-6 months but social media changes occur almost on a daily basis. It has therefore, become very important to understand the appropriate relationship between the two, especially that social media signals have become a necessary part of SEO ranking. Originally, the basic components of Search Engine Optimisation only involved meta-tags, keywords, links and content development. But as websites became so diverse, the factors affecting its rankings also became complicated and thus, online marketers including affordable SEO consultant, have to adjust to the changing landscape.

 

The need to create complex techniques has to be developed and so today’s SEO processes are undergoing a very dynamic change. Foremost among them are the social signals that are a key indication of a website’s SEO strength along with back linking and on-page activities.

So yes, social media is important for SEO but to what extent?

Its importance is increasing by the day as you may already be aware that almost every social media marketing company anywhere is working hard to deal with emerging SEO signals that merge social media rating in new algorithms. Google is leading the pack as it was the first to use tracking of social media activities for SEO ranking. In fact, Google+ was built around these functions and currently holds the most integrated option for social media. Of course, other social networking platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Four-square are equally important. Numbers wise, an independent research revealed that 10% of sites with high social signals received a 350% of traffic and had an increase of sales of up to 200%! So indeed, social media is that important for SEO. Final thoughts? As can be seen based on statistics, SEO is becoming dependent on social media and its growth will continue in the coming years. A lot of big companies are now leveraging their social activities as we move to the age of connectivity. If a small business won’t be able to adapt, then the chances of its survival is close to nil. If you need London SEO services or an SEO Expert London. Contact Link Spider to see how he can help your website grow.