Ask any SEO professional and they’ll agree that the integration of search and social is vital to the future of successful SEO. It’s still early days in some senses, but it will come as no surprise when search engines start adding social signals directly into the algorithm for ranking factors.
At Bluepost Digital, one of our main SEO tactics is to create excellent content. Whether the content is for on-site or for link building purposes, we only publish articles and blog posts that we ourselves would enjoy reading. However, as I’m sure any link builder will agree, it can sometimes be frustrating to know that where you publish the content may not necessarily have a wide audience. Often times the goal is to make sure the search engine sees the link, and then gives it some link juice accordingly.
Such is the plight of the link builder who appreciates quality editorial. But in my opinion this is where social media can lend a helping hand. Social outlets allow both the writer and the publisher to post, tweet and share an article, reaching a far larger audience than ever before. Social media has made it simple to maximise content shareability across different platforms to diverse audiences.
It’s easy to post an article somewhere on the internet, but publishing it alone doesn’t necessarily guarantee the search engines will see that article and thus follow your links. This is where social media comes to the rescue again. Because social platforms are constantly being updated, Google in particular spends a lot of time crawling them. It’s a fact that pages linked to on Twitter are often indexed faster than if Google had to find that page on its own. Speeding up this process can be a godsend!
However, I think where social media can complement search most effectively is in its high levels of organic engagement. Link building in the past has been a relatively easy avenue to game. Search engines have cracked down on this to some extent, but those that have the resource can get the links, regardless of their quality.
Search engines have tried to sort out the quality from the quantity, but sometimes the site with the most links still reigns supreme. Yes, social platforms can be gamed as well, but it’s much more difficult and involves a lot of time and resource. This is why I predict (along with most of the industry!) that social signals will become a bonafide ranking factor in their own right. Some social signals do already contribute to rankings, but I expect we’ll see a more straight-forward correlation in the near future.
The search industry has made a lot of predictions that haven’t come true in the past, but I think it’s fair to say that the integration of search and social will affect us all in the future.