Social media is shaking up how search engines are performing rankings. Rankings used to be determined purely by a company’s website, which included factors such as the content, meta tags and site structure in regards to SEO. Now, search engines are taking social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, into account by looking at business pages for comments, tweets, likes and shares. The amount of interaction users have with your company online is now a key part to search engine algorithms and determines how well your website will rank. While optimizing and driving traffic to your website is still very important, you now also have to focus on optimizing content on your social media sites in order to achieve a good ranking.

Here are two ways that search engines are using social media to determine your ranking in organic search:

Social Votes

Search engines are looking for sites that are both influential and relevant to the search topic. When a user likes a page on Facebook, writes a customer review or follows a page on Twitter, they are sending a social signal to search engines. When you have a large user base that interacts with you daily, this will send a very strong signal to the search engines which will in turn rank you higher than a competitor who isn’t receiving as much interaction.

Social Bookmarking

When a user shares content on their social media pages that links back to your website, another signal is sent to the search engine. The more shares you accumulate, the stronger the signals search engines receive, which shows that you are a socially influential and relevant site on the search topic. A good way to get people to share is to add buttons near all of your posted content that will allow them to click and share on social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, quickly and easily.

Social media is an important tool to include in part of any company’s SEO strategy. It is important to create content that is interesting and engaging while also strategically placing keywords within that content that will help your sites be found by the right customers. Fasturtle has experienced professionals who can help you create a personalized search engine optimization strategy that will help you reach your target market online. Contact Fasturtle online  or call to speak with a representative at (888) 468-8785 to learn more about our digital marketing services.