Social Media SEO: The 2025 Guide To Boosting Rankings and Discoverability

In 2025, search doesn’t start and end with Google, as it has for decades. Today, Internet users are looking for convenience and ease of access, and social media offers them just that! This means more and more people are leveraging social media as a search engine, which necessitates social search engine optimization (SEO).

Social media SEO involves making content easy to find everywhere. Whether users are using a hashtag on X, typing a search query into TikTok, or using the voice search feature on YouTube. Ultimately, it helps you funnel your audience’s attention, which is fragmented across different platforms. 

In this guide, we cover everything you need to know about social media SEO, including:

What is social media SEO?

Social media SEO is the practice of optimizing your social media profiles, posts, and content to help more people easily find your business and offerings. It involves customizing your profile using relevant information and keywords that target searchers who are casually browsing on social media platforms.

Why does social SEO matter?

Social SEO boosts your visibility on traditional search engines like Google and Bing. You can think of it as the sweet spot between social media marketing and search engine optimization that future-proofs your SEO strategy. 

Here’s why social search SEO is more important than ever in 2025:

• All social media platforms now have a search bar, which is prompting more users to leverage social media sites as search engines. 
• At least 24% of people use social media search as their primary search engine.
• 35% of millennials and 46% of Gen Zs opt for social media search engines over traditional search engines.
• More people prefer searching for product reviews on TikTok, professional insights on LinkedIn, aesthetic inspiration on Pinterest, and how-to guides on YouTube.

How does social SEO work?

Social SEO involves optimizing your social media profile and content to align with evolving search behaviors and algorithms. It involves a few key practices that make your brand more discoverable on social media platforms and traditional search engines. 

The following are social media SEO best practices to implement to help you rank everywhere:

1. Optimize your profile for search

Your social media profile sets the foundation for your visibility, and consistency is key when optimizing them. It involves using the same high-quality profile and cover images, username, and handle across all the platforms you’ll be utilizing. 

Your bio or description should also clearly communicate your niche with relevant keywords and descriptive usernames. To appear in more local searches and make it easier for clients to find your business, add location details.  

A link to your website also helps move traffic and may boost conversions. Finally, you can consider verifying your accounts to enhance credibility and visibility.

2. Align content with search intent

Aligning content to searcher intent ensures it’s relevant and useful for readers, driving more clicks, views, saves, and shares. 

Social media algorithms consider these conversions as votes of confidence for your content and may lead to better ranking. The algorithms then reward you with visibility, discoverability, engagement, and growth. 

On the other hand, misaligned content may lead to lost trust, engagement drops, and lower rankings because users often scroll past it and bounce quickly. The alignment depends on speaking your audience’s language, offering exactly what they need, and showing up in micro-moments.

3. Use hashtags strategically

Hashtags function as keywords on social media platforms. They make your content searchable and categorized, while also helping social platforms and search engines to understand and rank it better. Other benefits of hashtags include:

• Connecting you to a niche audience 
• Improving ranking on in-app search and explore feeds
• Contributing to trending content discovery and viral visibility
• Boosting cross-platform relevance and recognition 

An effective hashtag strategy includes 5-15 relevant hashtags for every platform and a mix of niche, branded, and broad hashtags. 

4. Add metadata to your posts

Metadata is supplementary information attached to your social media posts, especially visuals like photos and videos, to help users understand your content better. It tells algorithms what your content is about, who you created it for, as well as where and when you want it to appear. 

Metadata on social media includes:

• Captions
• Post descriptions
• Hashtags
• Alt text for images
• Video titles
• Location, product, and people tags 

5. Engage with your audience

Engagement is a key ranking factor for most social media platforms. It signals to the algorithms that your content is fulfilling searcher intent and validates that your content is relevant, valuable, and deserving of a higher ranking on search and discovery feeds.

Here are some best practices for improving social media engagement:

• Ask your audience questions, set up polls, and invite comments 
• Use clear and concise call-to-actions (CTAs) such as “Save this for later” or “Send to a friend”
• Respond to every comment left under your posts and in your DMs promptly and appropriately
• Leverage interactive story features like stickers and quizzes 
• Post consistently but not excessively 
• Track, analyze, test, and iterate performance 

Below is an example of how YouTube is engaging its audience on X with pools that are reaching thousands of users. 

6. Cross-link between platforms

Just like with traditional SEO, outbound linking is a key ranking factor for social media SEO. It interconnects your social profiles and website to build a strong web relevance and optimize traffic flow. 

Cross-linking involves including a link to your website on all your social media platforms and links to other platforms. You can either include the links in your social media bio or, for platforms like X, include them in the posts or captions.  

We get into platform-specific linking practices below, where we cover more platform-specific social media SEO practices. Below is a good example of a well-optimized Instagram profile for Glossier, which includes links to their website and other social media pages. 

Future trends in social SEO

Social SEO is still in its infancy, and there’s a lot to expect over the next few years as user behavior, platforms, and algorithms continue to evolve. One of the major trends that’ll shape social media SEO in 2025 and beyond is the fact that more people are adopting social media as a search engine.

The adoption of social search can be attributed to personalization of results, authenticity, variety of content formats, and real-time updates on the platforms. Google is also increasingly indexing social content from all the leading platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and TikTok. 

Users are also relieved that social media platforms support zero-click search experiences, where they can get all their answers without clicking through to any specific pages. Social media platforms will continue blurring the search experience, and you must optimize well to rank everywhere.

OmniSEOTM is your secret to future-proofing your organic visibility beyond traditional search engines. The strategy integrates foundational SEO elements with innovative technologies to optimize your online presence on social media channels, AI-powered search engines, and traditional search engines. 

Enhance visibility and discoverability on social media with WebFX

While you can totally handle optimizing for the various social media platforms, it may be challenging to keep up with everyday trends on each platform. However, outsourcing this potentially tedious task to social SEO experts like WebFX spares you the stress and ensures your rank everywhere.

At WebFX, we have a team of 45 social media experts capable of handling SEO for all your social media platforms. We also offer social media management services that’ll ensure your profiles stay visible and relevant all day.

Request a custom quote today to start the conversation on optimizing your social media platforms or call us at 888-601-5359 to talk to a strategist about the platforms and strategies that’ll work for your business.