Take your marketing to the next level with this epic combination
SEO and social media are two sides of the same coin.
SEO (search engine optimization) and social media marketing are each vital for reaching your target audience and increasing your brand’s visibility online.
They’re great in their own right but even better when conjoined.
Traditional SEO makes your content visible in search engine results, while social media amplifies your content to an audience who might not find you via search alone. A marketing strategy that combines both will help increase your audience.
If you look at SEO and social media together, you can drive more website traffic, improve content discovery, and strengthen your overall digital presence.
However, sometimes social media marketers don’t fully understand SEO, while SEO marketers aren’t great on socials.
We get that, which is why we’ve created this article to show the best ways to incorporate SEO strategies into social media content. We’ll also dispel myths about “social signals” as direct ranking factors and share a few practical tips for planning social campaigns with maximum impact.
In this guide:
How social media helps SEO
Let's start by dispelling a long-standing myth about so-called "social signals". The idea is that getting lots of engagement on social media boosts your search engine ranking.
Unfortunately, it's not true – the two are not quite so directly linked – but there are other indirect ways social media can help SEO.
Content distribution and backlinks
Social media is a powerful content amplifier. When you share your website link or blog post on social channels, you expose it to a broader audience.
If your content is valuable and resonates, people may link to it from their own websites or blogs. Those inbound links boost your site’s authority and can improve your Google ranking.
In essence, social sharing increases the likelihood of earning quality backlinks – a known ranking factor for traditional SEO. It also drives referral traffic: users who click your social media links and end up on your site, sending positive signals of interest to search engines.
Brand awareness and search demand
An active social media presence builds your brand’s visibility and reputation.
When users repeatedly see your brand on social media networks, they become more familiar with and trust it. This often leads to an increase in branded searches – people directly Googling your company or website.
It also means when your site does appear in search engine results pages, users are more likely to click it because they recognize the name.
In short, social media can prime your target audience to engage with your brand via search. Greater brand awareness through social exposure can translate into higher click-through rates on search engine result pages (SERPs) and more search traffic for your site.
Social profiles rank on Google
Your social media profiles often rank on the first page of Google for your brand name.
For example, a search for a company might show its Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram pages as top results. These profiles are an additional funnel for potential customers.
A well-optimized profile (with up-to-date info and a clear website link) can encourage people to visit your site or learn more.
Google even integrates social information into its knowledge panels and local listings; Google Business Profiles pull in data from social sites to give searchers a complete view of a business.
Maintaining active, optimized social profiles, therefore, helps control your online reputation and ensures that when people search for your brand, they find official, positive channels. This integrates SEO with reputation management – a benefit beyond rankings alone.
Increased user engagement
While Google doesn’t count Facebook likes or Instagram followers in its algorithm, the user behavior resulting from social media buzz can impact SEO.
Suppose you shared a blog post that goes viral on social media – you might see a spike in traffic as users click through to read it. Strong on-site engagement from that traffic can be a positive quality signal.
Think of social media as seeding the initial interest that can lead to more search visibility down the line.
Faster indexing and content discovery
Social media can act as a discovery channel that leads search engines to your content faster.
When you publish a new web page or blog post, sharing it on a platform like X can sometimes help search engine bots find and index that page more quickly (since popular social sites are crawled frequently).
Local SEO and reviews
For businesses focused on local SEO, social media and SEO overlap in the area of positive reviews and local citations.
A strong rating on your Facebook page or positive customer reviews on sites like Yelp can enhance your credibility. Google’s local search algorithm considers overall online reputation – including reviews on Google and other platforms.
Social platforms also often appear in local search results (for example, a restaurant’s Facebook page might appear alongside its website). By encouraging satisfied customers to leave reviews on social platforms and engaging with your community, you support your local SEO.
Additionally, consistent information (name, address, phone) across your social profiles and Google listing helps search engines trust your business details, boosting local SEO accuracy.
Treating social media as search engines
Another reason SEO and social media need to work together is the evolving way people search for information.
These days, it's not just Google search results that should be on your radar – many people (especially younger generations) increasingly use social media platforms as search engines.
Rise of social search
A recent survey found that 45% of Gen Z users are likelier to try TikTok or Instagram to search for questions than Google.
Even about 35% of Millennials reported this preference. This highlights a generational change in search behavior. Those searches can be about all sorts of things – from products and services to answers to questions.
You might be surprised to learn that YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine (after Google), handling billions of queries that lead people to useful YouTube videos. Facebook search is not far behind, either.
In fact, by 2021, YouTube was #2 and Facebook #4 among the most-used search engines globally. They outpace lots of other search-specific platforms, like Microsoft’s Bing. That's why YouTube SEO, and video content in general, is particularly important.
This also means huge volumes of people turn to social media channels to find content. And if your brand or content isn’t optimized for those in-app searches, you’re missing out on a sizable audience.
>> Learn how to optimize your brand for social media search in our guide
Product discovery on social
If we dive even deeper into how people use social search, it’s clear that social media feeds are where research on future purchases is done.
According to Statista, 24% of Americans use social media first for product discovery – not Google. Even 18% of Gen X users – born between 1965 and 1980 – choose socials as their number one search destination.
A significant portion of consumers simply bypass Google and go straight to social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube to search for things they’re interested in.
This is a dramatic shift that blurs the line between social media marketing and SEO – and it means you need to make sure your social media SEO is on point so that you come up in search results. This means using relevant keywords and creating social media posts that reflect trending topics in your industry.
Aligning your SEO strategy with social marketing
There are a few different tricks for bringing your SEO efforts and social media strategy together. You don’t necessarily need to do them all, but knowing these alignment tactics will make your overall strategy much easier to deploy.
Unified content planning
The aim here is to break down silos between your SEO content team and your social media marketers.
When planning content, consider both the keywords that drive search traffic and the topics that perform well on social.
For example, use SEO keyword research tools (like Google Keyword Planner) to find relevant keywords that your audience searches for, and also use social listening to see what trending conversations or frequently asked questions are popping up on social media.
Brandwatch Consumer Research can then help identify trending topics and consumer sentiments from social data. By combining these insights, you can create content that is optimized for search and highly shareable on social – a double win.
Optimize social profiles and content
Adding some SEO best practices to your social media presence is also a good idea.
This means using consistent brand names, handles, and descriptions across profiles. Your metadata needs to work for you.
Ensure each social media account links back to your website, and consider adding social profile links on your site. Mutual linking can help users navigate and help search engines associate your site with official profiles.
For maximum content visibility, treat social post text like micro-content that can be optimized: incorporate target keywords naturally in your social media posts when relevant. This could be the product name, category, or problem you solve. Hashtags can also be seen as keywords in many platforms’ searches.
Cross-promote and link between channels
Make it easy for people to go from your social media to your website and vice versa.
Every piece of content on your website should be easy to share on social media. Add social sharing buttons to blog posts or product pages. Likewise, don’t be afraid to occasionally ask your social followers to check out new website content.
The more fluid the journey between social media and your website, the more likely you are to drive traffic. In this case, both channels benefit.
Also, if you have a web page ranking well or containing valuable information, repurpose it into a social media post or an infographic for your social audiences.
The idea is to integrate SEO and social efforts, so they constantly feed into each other’s success.
Use social media to build relationships (and earn links)
A large part of SEO is off-page optimization – getting quality sites to link to you.
We’re talking backlinks, when another website or social media user links to your website from within their content. Backlinks are important because they tell Google that your website is worth promoting. If respected websites and channels link to you, your site is surely worth visiting.
Social media is fertile ground for relationship building, which can generate backlinks. Engage with influencers, industry communities, and thought leaders on platforms like LinkedIn, X, or niche forums.
By conversing and sharing insights (not just promoting yourself), you increase the likelihood of being on their radar.
Over time, this can lead to collaboration or them citing your content (with a link) in their own blog or resource. For instance, if a journalist or blogger follows you on X and sees you regularly post useful stats or articles, they might reference your company’s research in an article (earning you a backlink).
Use tools for efficiency
Managing an integrated strategy is easier with the right tools. A social media management platform can help schedule and monitor your posts across multiple social media channels, ensuring consistency and optimal timing.
Using a unified platform like Brandwatch Social Media Management allows you to plan your social media calendar alongside content campaigns so you can coordinate SEO-driven content releases with social promotion.
Additionally, track your efforts. For SEO, use Google Search Console and Google Analytics to see how your organic search traffic is trending and which pages are top performers. In GA, you can specifically look at the Social reports to see how much traffic and conversions are coming from social sources.
By reviewing these analytics together, you might notice patterns – like content that went viral on social media and then later saw a boost in Google traffic, or vice versa. These insights help refine your strategy over time.
Consistent messaging and keywords
Ideally, your SEO and social content should be telling the same story. This means your marketing strategy should have a unified voice and message across all platforms.
If you’re targeting certain target keywords or themes in SEO, incorporate those themes in your social content strategy, too. That doesn’t mean spamming keywords everywhere but rather reinforcing the topics you want to be known for.
Consistency helps build authority. Someone who sees your helpful social posts on a topic and then later finds your blog on Google covering the same topic will recognize your authority and is more likely to trust and engage with your content.
It also means the people who stumble across your brand – whether from search or social – find relevant content and messaging tailored to them, which improves engagement and conversion rates.
Measuring the impact of social SEO integration
When you blur the lines between SEO and social media, how do you know if it’s working? To figure that out, it’s important to set goals and track social media metrics that will tell you more about the success of your integrated approach.
SEO metrics
On the SEO side, monitor your search traffic and keyword rankings over time. Are your pages seeing an uplift in organic traffic after being pushed on social media? Google Analytics is invaluable here: look at referral traffic from social networks and the trend in organic traffic.
If a piece of content gets a lot of social traction, check if its search impressions and clicks improved in Google Search Console – you might find that social buzz led to more people searching for it or clicking it on SERPs.
Also, watch engagement metrics on your site (bounce rate, time on page, pages per session) and split the data between visitors coming from social versus search. This should reveal how your audiences interact and whether your content is meeting their needs.
Social metrics
On the social media side, track your social media engagement (likes, shares, comments) and follower growth. Engagement is a sign that your content is resonating. High engagement often correlates with content that people find valuable – which is the kind of content that earns backlinks and performs well in search.
You should also track social media performance in terms of traffic generation. How many clicks to your website are coming from each platform? Which posts drove the most traffic? Using UTM parameters on your social links can help tie specific posts to website visits and even conversions.
Don’t forget social media signals, like brand mentions and sentiment, in the broader marketing sense. Set up alerts or use a tool like Brandwatch Consumer Research to see if your content or brand is being talked about more as your integrated strategy rolls out.
An uptick in positive mentions or positive reviews on social can indirectly benefit SEO by enhancing your brand’s authority and click-through appeal on search.
Combined metrics
Another useful metric is your share of voice in search vs social. Are you a go-to source for social conversations on certain topics? And are you ranking for those topics on Google? If not, you might need to create more content or engage more on one channel or the other to balance it out.
Finally, stay up to date with SEO trends and social media trends. The digital landscape changes quickly. For example, the emergence of new social media platforms (who could forget the rapid rise of TikTok) or changes in Google’s algorithm could mean that you need to make changes in your approach to social media SEO.
That said, it doesn't look like social media and SEO will be parting ways again soon.
So, keep your social media SEO strategy up to date and watch how user behavior evolves. If a new platform gains popularity or if Google starts indexing more social content, you'll probably need to adjust your strategy accordingly.
Time to adopt a unified approach for greater results
These days, SEO and social media are two closely related parts of a cohesive digital strategy.
By combining the long-term traffic potential of SEO with the immediate reach and engagement of social media, marketers can significantly boost their brand’s visibility online.
The key is to focus on creating valuable content that serves your audience’s needs and then proactively distribute and amplify that content through social channels. When you do this, you’ll find that social media helps SEO in numerous ways, from driving qualified traffic and building links to increasing brand searches and improving content credibility.
Remember, the primary focus should always be on delivering value to your audience. If you produce content that genuinely educates, entertains, or solves problems for people, it will naturally attract attention on social media and earn trust in search engines.
As you refine your strategy, there are a few tools and platforms that can make your life easier. For example, Brandwatch Consumer Research will reveal what your audience is talking about across social media (so you can create content that hits those interests). At the same time, Brandwatch Social Media Management streamlines your content scheduling and engagement, keeping your social SEO efforts consistent and data-informed.
Use these solutions to save time and uncover opportunities that manual monitoring might miss.
By treating search and social as partners, you’ll drive more organic traffic, build a stronger online brand, and ultimately reach more potential customers.
To see how an integrated approach can work for your business, explore Brandwatch’s suite of digital marketing tools or request a demo – and watch your online presence grow to new heights.
