Social Media & Ads Checker

Why Social Media Matters for SEO

While social media signals are not a direct Google ranking factor, a strong social media presence significantly influences your SEO performance through indirect mechanisms. Google has confirmed that social media profiles and activity contribute to establishing entity identity and brand recognition. When your brand has a consistent presence across platforms, search engines gain more confidence in your website's authority and trustworthiness.

Social media drives referral traffic, amplifies content distribution, generates natural backlinks, and increases brand searches — all of which are genuine SEO signals. A viral social media post can lead to dozens of backlinks from blogs and news outlets covering the topic. Brand searches (people googling your brand name) signal to Google that your site is noteworthy.

Additionally, Google indexes social media profiles and often displays them prominently in branded search results. Having well-optimized YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and other profiles creates multiple touchpoints that dominate the first page of results for your brand name, pushing competitors and negative results further down.

YouTube and SEO: The Video Search Engine

YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world, processing over 500 hours of video uploaded every minute. For brands, YouTube offers a unique opportunity to appear in both Google video search results and YouTube's own search. Google frequently features YouTube videos in regular web search results, especially for "how to" and tutorial queries.

Key YouTube metrics that matter for SEO include subscriber count (indicating audience trust and reach), view count (content popularity), engagement rate (likes, comments, and shares as a percentage of views), and publishing frequency (consistency signals authority). YouTube's algorithm heavily favors channels that post consistently and maintain high watch time and engagement.

A good YouTube engagement rate is above 2%, meaning that for every 100 views, at least 2 people interact through likes or comments. Channels with engagement above 4% are considered exceptional. The average engagement rate varies by niche — educational content tends to see higher engagement than entertainment content due to the depth of viewer investment.

YouTube Shorts, introduced as a response to TikTok, have become an important growth channel. Shorts (videos under 60 seconds) can drive subscriber growth and channel discovery. Our tool identifies Shorts in your recent videos by detecting videos with duration under 60 seconds, following the same methodology used by YouTube's API since there is no native isShort field.

Instagram and Brand Authority

Instagram has evolved from a photo-sharing app to a major marketing platform with over 2 billion monthly active users. For SEO, Instagram matters because it provides another avenue for brand discovery, helps establish E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) signals, and can drive significant referral traffic through profile links and Stories.

The most important Instagram metrics for marketing include follower count (brand reach), engagement rate (likes + comments divided by followers), posting frequency (consistency), and the follower-to-following ratio (a high ratio indicates organic growth and authority, while a 1:1 or lower ratio may suggest follow-for-follow tactics).

Instagram engagement rates have declined significantly over the years as the platform has matured. In 2025, the average engagement rate for accounts with 10,000+ followers is approximately 0.50%. Rates above 1.5% are considered excellent, and rates between 0.5% and 1.5% are healthy. Accounts with fewer followers typically see higher engagement rates due to more personal audience connections.

Business accounts on Instagram unlock additional features like Insights, contact buttons, and shopping. Our tool checks whether an account is a business account, verified, and actively posting. A verified badge (blue checkmark) adds significant credibility and is a strong trust signal for both users and search engines evaluating your brand.

Google Ads and Brand Visibility

The Google Ads Transparency Center, launched in 2023, makes all Google advertising publicly visible. This means anyone can see which brands are running ads, how many ads they have, and what those ads look like. For competitive analysis, this is invaluable — you can see exactly how your competitors are positioning themselves in paid search, display, and YouTube advertising.

Running Google Ads doesn't directly improve organic rankings, but it creates multiple benefits: increased brand visibility leads to more brand searches (which IS an SEO signal), ad clicks drive traffic that can lead to natural backlinks, and being present in both paid and organic results increases click-through rates for your organic listings by establishing familiarity and trust.

Google's verified advertiser status adds another layer of credibility. When a brand is verified by Google, it means Google has confirmed the advertiser's identity and business details. This verification badge appears in the Ads Transparency Center and indicates a legitimate, established business. Our tool checks for this verification status as part of the overall social media and advertising analysis.

Meta Ads Library and Social Advertising

The Meta Ad Library (formerly Facebook Ad Library) provides transparency into all active ads running on Facebook and Instagram. Like Google's Transparency Center, it allows anyone to search for brands and see their active campaigns, creative assets, and targeting information. This is a powerful competitive intelligence tool.

Brands running ads on both Facebook and Instagram (multi-platform) demonstrate a sophisticated marketing strategy that maximizes reach. Recent ad activity indicates an active, investing brand. The number of ad creatives visible in the library suggests the level of A/B testing and creative variety being employed — more creatives generally indicate a mature advertising operation.

Our tool scrapes the Meta Ad Library to identify whether a brand is actively advertising, how many ads they have running, which platforms (Facebook, Instagram, or both) their ads appear on, and whether their campaigns are recent. This information is combined with social profile data to give a comprehensive view of a brand's digital marketing presence.

Social Media Links on Your Website

Including social media links on your website serves multiple purposes. First, it helps users connect with your brand on their preferred platform. Second, it provides search engines with additional signals about your brand's online presence. Google's Knowledge Graph can use these links to build a more complete picture of your entity.

Best practices for social media links include placing them in your website's header, footer, or both for easy discoverability. Use proper Schema.org markup (sameAs property) to explicitly tell search engines which social profiles belong to your brand. Ensure all links work correctly — broken social links create a poor impression and waste crawl budget.

Our tool scans your website's homepage to automatically detect social media links for YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and other platforms. It then extracts usernames and handles from these URLs to perform in-depth analysis of each connected platform. This automation means you don't need to manually enter each profile — just provide your website URL and the tool does the rest.

How to Improve Your Social Media Score

Improving your social media presence score requires consistent effort across multiple fronts. Start by ensuring you have active profiles on at least YouTube and Instagram — these are the two most important platforms for SEO visibility. Optimize your profiles with complete bios, profile pictures, and links back to your website.

For YouTube, focus on publishing consistently (at least weekly), optimizing video titles and descriptions with relevant keywords, creating engaging thumbnails, and encouraging viewer interaction through calls-to-action. Monitor your engagement rate and aim for above 2%. Use YouTube Shorts to reach new audiences and drive subscriber growth.

For Instagram, maintain a consistent posting schedule, use relevant hashtags, engage with your community through comments and Stories, and create shareable content that encourages saves and shares. Consider switching to a Business account for access to analytics and additional features. Aim for an engagement rate above 0.5% (the 2025 average) with a goal of reaching 1.5%+.

Consider running paid campaigns on Google and Meta platforms to boost visibility and drive traffic. Even small budgets can make a meaningful impact on brand recognition. Ensure your ad creatives are varied (test multiple versions) and that you're running campaigns on both Facebook and Instagram for maximum reach within the Meta ecosystem. Seek Google advertiser verification to add credibility to your paid campaigns.

Understanding Our Social Media Scoring

Our social media checker evaluates your presence across multiple dimensions: platform availability, audience size, engagement quality, posting activity, and advertising presence. Each parameter is scored as either passed (meeting industry benchmarks) or failed (needing improvement), with a severity rating of critical, moderate, or minor.

The overall score is calculated by averaging parameter scores (100 for passed, 20 for failed) with a bonus for multi-platform presence: +10 points for 3+ platforms, +5 for 2 platforms. The final score is capped at 100. A score of 80+ indicates excellent social media presence, 50-79 suggests room for improvement, and below 50 indicates significant gaps that should be addressed.

Remember that social media is a long-term investment. Scores can improve significantly with consistent effort over 3-6 months. Focus on the failed parameters first, especially those marked as moderate or critical severity, as these have the biggest impact on your overall digital marketing effectiveness.