Promoting your business on social media can be a great way of driving traffic to your website and likewise, your website can be a great way of increasing your customer/follower base through links to your social media – but does it have any search engine optimisation (SEO) benefits? The simple answer is – Yes! Social media can help improve your search engine results page (SERP) rankings.

When you link your social platforms back to your website pages or blog posts, these, when explored by your audience, create what are called organic inbound links to your website. These links can help to validate your websites content, show that you have interesting, unique, shareable content and the upside to this is you could be seen as an authority of your chosen service/topic. Your social platforms, whatever you decide to go with – Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn or Instagram, and the inbound links they can create back to your website, can create more visibility for your website, your business and ultimately improve your search engine rankings. Having a ‘mobile friendly’ website also helps now – as from last April, any site that’s ‘mobile friendly’ is ranked higher than those that are not, on mobile search results.

You might say ‘social media isn’t for us! Our client base doesn’t use social media’. This is a very short term viewpoint. Social media may have been taken up initially by a younger demographic and while your current demographic may be a lot older, remember that every demographic age group grows up – so utilising these platforms and engaging with these younger demographic groups is critical to give your business the opportunity to grow and expand its customer base. In an ageing population capturing and engaging with a younger demographic is the key to brand longevity.

So what are the best social platforms to use to get your business ranked better or more frequently in search results? This varies depending on your clients and service but my suggestion is to initially try Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. You might say ‘Google+ really?’ But it’s for a good reason. That social platform is run by Google themselves and it’s suggested that in search results Google places more importance on the social platform over others. That’s not to say other platforms are worse – in fact Twitter often ranks highly as well in search results. Twitter, Google+ and other platforms to some extent can all help raise your search engine results page (SERP) ranking if you include keywords in your social profiles and articles by using them as #hashtags. All social platforms allow you to integrate these in a variety of ways but the result is essentially the same – the opportunity for better SERP positioning. Utilising keywords across your social media and your website is just part of the process. It’s also vital to create unique, shareable image or blog post content that people want to read or share with others.

Don’t forget that each social platform can be utilised as its own search engine as well, giving your followers search results for content surrounding specific #hashtags – again creating or sharing content around trending topics can increase your following, traffic to your website and general brand awareness.

In essence social media is a great way to help boost your SEO though the use of keywords (normally in the form of #hashtags) and inbound links to your unique and shareable website content.  Social media is about engaging with your existing followers and in the process you can gain new ones that’ll explore and share your content and in turn help to raise your SERP profile. If you’re not utilising at least one relevant social platform you’re missing out potentially getting your business seen by the right people.

If you need any help or advice on your social profiles and how they can help in search engine results or you just want to know more about how social media can help your business get in touch with me at http://paulkirkdesign.co.uk or at @PKirk_designer