While many business owners tend to get lost in the number of likes, followers, and other social engagement metrics, there is another major benefit of developing and maintaining a strong social media presence that sometimes goes unnoticed: improved search engine optimization. 

Here are four ways that your social media presence can help your brand rank better in search engines.

High-Quality Inbound Links

One of the key factors that search engines use to determine rankings is the prominence of sites that are linking to your business. In the eyes of search engines, social networking sites with overwhelming volumes of traffic, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google+,  are among the most credible sources. So if you have numerous links coming from them to your website, it will help drive up your rankings. This means you should have links pointing to your website in your social networking profiles, such as your page description or about section. You should also make sure that your posts contain links back to your website when possible.

Increased Volume of Inbound Links

Not only does social media help you increase the quality of the inbound links to your website, it also will increase their volume when posts containing your company's URL are shared by your followers. In addition to the quality of the websites that are linking to your page, search engines also consider the total number of links. The more social media posts with your company's web address in them that are shared, the better your search rankings will be.

Google+ Extended Search Profiles

Whether you like it or not, Google+ is here to stay (and it has the power to affect your search rankings too). It may help to think of Google+ as a social aspect of your company's presence on Google, rather than an independent social network. It also enables Google to show an "extended search profile" for your business in the sidebar whenever your site comes up in the search results, which may have a significant impact on your organic traffic from Google.

Extended search profiles:

• Dramatically increase the amount of screen space dedicated to your company, which alone will improve click-throughs.
• Allow you to display more engaging content, which should also drive more traffic to your page from Google.
• Show your profile picture and other images you post to Google+, your latest status updates, customer reviews and ratings, and pictures of some the people who have your business added to their circles. 
• Provides social proof that others should add your company to their circles as well.

Get New Content to Appear Faster

Even though search engines are constantly "crawling" the internet looking for new pages to add to their databases, it can often take a few days or weeks for your new page to rank in the search engines. Two of the most important factors in getting your site crawled are the frequency of which your site is updated and how much traffic it receives. 

Sites that attract significant traffic and post a substantial amount of new content each day will get crawled far more regularly than ones that don't. In order to make sure your posts and other new content show up in search results as quickly as possible, post a link to your new content via social media immediately after you publish it. Search engines will crawl the social media sites before they crawl your site, recognize there is new page that they don't have data for, and will add that page to the index much sooner than if you waited for them to crawl your site.

Due to current trends in SEO, it seems likely that search engine optimization and social media will only grow closer as the technology moves forward, Luckily, it's never too late to start building your brand's social presence or optimizing your site. If you would like to learn more about how 360 PSG can help you manage your social media or SEO campaigns, please contact an Account Manager at 360psg.com.