Can Facebook Help Improve SEO Results?

The digital marketing industry fully agrees that having a strong social media presence can boost a website’s organic rankings. But to what extent does sharing content on Facebook, alongside paid ads, really help improve rankings? It takes a great deal of creativity and industry experience to use Facebook as a way to leverage SEO results. It also requires having the right tools. This is why savvy organizations seek SEO agencies that focus on growth marketing, as they know how advanced organic strategies incorporate social media and other strategies to get maximum results.

Although there is no way to actually know what percentage of a website’s ability to rank rests on signals generated by Facebook, this article will share insights from our WEBITMD efforts with the goal to help others consider how Facebook can help them boost their rankings.

Facebook Paid Advertising and SEO Possibilities?

Although there are no direct SEO benefits in Facebook paid ads, there is a small external opportunity organic improvements. Keep in mind that Facebook is one way of having a direct line of communication with customers. If a paid ad takes consumers to a Facebook page designed to convert people, and if there is a chat feature on that page, companies have the opportunity to grab people who would otherwise bounce, and persuade them to visit a page on the website for more information needed for a purchasing decision. If a paid ad isn’t going to convert right off the bat, it might as well have a backup plan to give fence-sitters additional information, and the extra traffic to the site will spark engagement signals that will help empower organic ranking.

Link Building Efforts

It’s no secret that social media and link building go hand in hand. Growth marketing agencies always focus on a symbiotic relationship through a strategically implemented plan. This will consist of Facebook posts that will, ultimately, create a domino effect where Facebook users (if properly motivated) not only share your link on the Facebook platform, but on other social media sites, forums, and the comment sections of blogs thus creating links across the web. FYI, If you are building backlinks to improve SEO outside of social media, you can use links generated form Facebook to empower those backlinks if using the right on-site and off-site content strategy.

While this is happening, this type of link building strategy will increase traffic to your site through direct and indirect means thus improving your Facebook following and your site’s organic ranking due to generated social signals. It is paramount you capitalize on the symbiotic relationship between social media and link building if you hope to make Facebook a part of your SEO efforts.

Generate Social Signals for SEO by Engaging Ideal Customers

Because Facebook displays tons of personal data on its users, marketers can easily engage in precise audience targeting by tapping into ideal markets. Growth marketing agencies regularly hone in on their target audience by reaching segments according to location, age and interests–information that shows up in user feeds most likely to show interest in your products or services. This is a growth hacking strategy that takes time, but is well worth the effort because it allows direct access to the segments of your consumer audience most likely engage your website and buy from you.

Once you have a healthy Facebook audience, you will need to discover the best ways to engage them. Keep in mind the typical Facebook user is not on a mission to make a purchase. This means you can use content to entertain your audience as opposed to direct, in-your-face sales ads.

Another way Facebook improves SEO after you have built up a big following is this: According to our data, Facebook only shows business posts in organic search results that have a high level of engagement. Have you ever seen a Yelp review organically rank well? Occasionally, Facebook pages do this too. Be sure to find creative ways to use Facebook posts to strengthen your brand and drive engagement. You can post links to fun contests, entertaining and informative articles relevant to your industry, and any other tactics that can encourage users to engage.  The greater the engagement, the more impressions you receive from organic Facebook posts.

Loop Your Facebook Profile into Your Tier One Website Pages

Growth marketing agencies specializing in SEO generally segment landing pages in two tiers. Consider looping your Facebook profile page into your priority tier 1 pages. This will give you an opportunity to organically rank your Facebook profile page for branded keywords. If your content is especially good and you already have high-ranking blogs or web pages linking to your Facebook page, you can even rank it for industry-related and longtail keywords that reflect your products and services.

One reason why the average spend on social media by businesses has more than tripled since 2015 is simple: strengthening your brand’s image on Facebook and other social media platforms enables companies to communicate with their customers in ways that were never possible before. Facebook can be an integral part to an SEO strategy if run by digital marketing experts through a growth stack service model.

Feel Motivated to Leverage SEO with Your Facebook Account?

If this article inspired you to start thinking about how you can make Facebook and your organic search strategy work together, we invite you to download our FREE guide on WEBITMD’s modern approach to SEO. Learn how our strategy is unlike anything else offered by another agency, and see if your business goals seem to align. The call us with your questions and let’s discover some hidden growth opportunities!