The relationship between social media and SEO isn’t at all clear cut… but it does exist, and it can help you rank better if you understand it.

Social media marketers and SEOs should work together, and not separately as it is in the most companies.

Is social media ranking factor and does it boost my rankings?

No.

According to Google, social media is NOT a direct SEO ranking factor.

But, there’s plenty of evidence that social signals such as likes and shares ARE related to your ranking somehow.

When most people ask the above question what they likely have in mind is one of two possible effects:

• The links in social posts send ranking signals to the pages to which they link.
• The amount of social mentions and/or engagement for a content piece or a brand is a search ranking factor.

Social mentions/engagements&SEO

First, it is highly unlikely that the major search engines currently use mentions or amount of engagement around a brand or piece of content as a direct ranking signal.

Years ago they may have experimented with it, but all indications point that such experiments have been abandoned.

More importantly, it is difficult for a search engine to reliably assess the authority of a given post, or even a social profile.

Create content that’s worth linking to

Instead of producing more of the same on your blog, focus on creating content that’s more informational and less salesy.

Maybe it’s a tutorial helping readers to do something, a collection of useful tips, a well-designed infographic, or something else that people will want to share with their audience.

Simply having a couple of really good in-depth blog posts, or some interesting and useful data, can give you the opportunities to get not only lots of shares but also links from influential websites.

Don’t focus only on followers

It’s easy to get stuck on the number of followers that you have. Perhaps you want to hit the 100,000-follower mark, but will it actually do anything for you? No. Google doesn’t care about your follower count or fans.

You can also see who shares your content, and reach out to these people if they have blogs that can benefit your SEO in some way. Content shares can tell you if your content is impactful or not.

Short conclusion

But first, if your business is big enough to have separate people (or even teams) working on search and social, do everything you can to get them working cooperatively.

Almost all social networks, and certainly all the major ones, nofollow all external links. So these links pass no SEO equity to the target pages.