Google Search Console is starting to show you traffic to your social media channels. I wanna talk about why I'm so excited about this and why social media is becoming more important for your SEO campaign. So over the last year or two, Google has added more and more social media posts to their search results.
Instagram posts, X post videos like TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn posts, LinkedIn articles. The post from nearly every social media platform can now appear in Google search results. And especially for smaller brands without a lot of authority, it's typically much easier to rank for competitive terms with a social media post than it is from your own website.
This is often called parasite SEO and it's very effective. Right now. Large language models also love social media posts, especially Reddit and Facebook groups.
We've never really been able to see what traffic we're getting from Google Search to these social media channels. If you don't know, Google Search Console is a free tool that lets you see traffic from Google's organic search to your website. It shows you what people are actually searching for, where you ranked and what pages got clicks.
It is by far the most actionable data available to you as an SEO. we'll finally have that same data for our social media channels. But the reason this is so exciting is because almost no one is optimizing their social media posts for Google search right now.
Often times all you have to do is put the keyword you want to rank for at the front of your title or caption. We've been doing this for our clients lately and while it doesn't always work, it is surprising how often we can get on the page 1 for a fairly competitive term. And these are from channels that have almost no following or views.
However, having data from Google Search Console to see what terms people are actually searching for before seeing these posts in Google search results will be a game changer. Right now, you can only add social media channels if Google themselves identifies the relationship between the channel and your website. But it looks like eventually you'll be able to link them yourself.