How Social Media Transfers SEO Benefits

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

More and more I see articles and posts on where social media and search engine optimization connect. Many more marketers are starting to get the idea that social media is itself a form of SEO. Of course, spammers have known that for a long time.

Given this truth, however, the worst kind of social media you can perform is social media for the sake of SEO. You don’t want your social media campaigns to just be focused on the SEO benefits. That’s only one aspect of how you can leverage social media for branding and marketing. There’s a lot more to it than that.

Nevertheless, it pays to be cognizant of the optimization benefits no matter what you do. In my campaigns I’ve noticed that there are two – yes, two – solid SEO benefits to a successful social media campaign. And those two benefits are pretty the same benefits you get from article marketing, blogging, and every other online marketing effort. So what are they? Hold on to your chair:

1. Links
2. Traffic

Big surprise, huh?

I’m sure you know how links play into your SEO strategy. So I won’t belabor that. But I will talk about traffic because not everyone knows that traffic has its SEO benefits. Not just quantity, but quality.

One of the measures that search engines look at now in determining the quality of a website is what its visitors do. Do you have a high bounce rate? If so then that could be diminishing your SEO efforts. On the other hand, if people are staying on your site longer then that speaks to how good you’ve become at earning their trust. In general, I’d say websites with a low bounce rate do better in the SERPs than sites with an inordinately high traffic bounce rate.

So what’s the take away? Use social media, but make sure that when you send people to your website from the social media sites you give them a reason to stay. It will likely increase your SERP positioning.