Does Social Media Marketing Really Boost SEO?

About a year ago, I began running the social media pages for a promotional company. The posts didn’t get a lot of engagement; although they did reach a fair few on certain platforms.

The content I posted for them was very generic; it was all about the products they sold. The photos I used were all of the products on a white background; I just used what I had from their website

A few months ago I got an email from the client explaining that they were going to stop using my services. There were cuts within their business that had to be made, and seeing as they couldn’t see a vast improvement to their social platforms, I got the boot.

This did annoy me for a while as I always felt that the MD just didn’t appreciate the work I did for them and couldn’t see past the likes and comments a post got. In their eyes, if the post didn’t have any engagement then it was pointless.

Fast forward to today and I decided to randomly search keywords for the company. Baring in mind they have done Google Adwords, but very rarely post on their social media at all. What do I find?

Not them!

Now they may have stopped Google Adwords which would explain why they are not in the ad section. It may have been something else they cut out within the business; which is fair enough. Google Adwords isn’t a huge necessity, especially if you have other means to get your Google rankings up… like social media.

What I found was, not only did the company not appear in the ad section of the Google results page. They also were a few links down the page - they had actually gone down since I was working with them.

To me this is proof that social media does have an impact on Google. Whether your posts get loads of engagement or not, content is content and Google will always like new stuff.

Why am I telling you this?

So that you don’t make the same mistake as this ex-client and stop both Google Adwords and social media.
Neither of them are really necessary, but stopping both will have a negative impact on your website SEO.

One of the best things you can do is add relevant links to your social posts. Even if no one sees it, even if no one clicks on it. Links back to your website in other places on the web will boost SEO. An easy way to do this is to post about a product and put a link to that product on your website.

I feel as though this ex-client’s case is proof that social media posts do boost SEO to an extent.
Until next time, Alison x