Social Media & SEO - How Social Signals Help Your Ranking

Thursday, 17 January 2019 / Published in online business, Seo strategies

Social Media & SEO – How Social Signals Help Your Ranking

In the past few decades, we have witnessed the greatest information revolution ever, starting from a very simple messenger to enormous online platforms being one of the most effective ways of advertising and reaching vast audiences.

Business owners and content creators are constantly searching for the most efficient way to drive their search engine ranking to the first page of Google, Yahoo and Bing search engine. Their struggle is not over even when they succeed, as they have to continue to publish fresh and good quality content to their readers, to keep their ranking.

But have you ever thought of the correlation between SEO and social media signals? What is their role in your search engine ranking? It is actually quite a burning question that search engines get asked very frequently: “How and does your social media influences SEO?”

The very short answer is – yes, SEO and social media work in sync to bring users valuable and engaging content every day. For that simple reason, it is important for content creators and business owners to combine the effectiveness of SEO and social platforms by actively promoting and sharing their content to relevant audiences. Before we start talking about ways to optimize social media for better search engine ranking, let’s get a better understanding of what social signals are.

Social signals basically refer to an integrative metric of how the audience interacts with a website’s content on various social media sites. It includes all actions such as votes, likes, comments, retweets, and pins, that indicate to search engine users’ interaction with your website’s content.

What is the role of social signal in SEO?

There have been a lot of speculations about whether or not social signals are a ranking factor. One marketing guru once said that social media to SEO is like gasoline to a fire, and that is probably the best explanation of SEO and social media symbiosis. When you put up content, create a product or offer a service, best and most effective way of promoting it is through social media.

You can also engage your audience to “socialize” your content on their social platforms by simply adding sharing buttons to your web pages. That way your content gets shared and reaches out to more users, therefore prospective clients.

Here are some of the ways in which social signs affect (and boost) your search engine ranking:

1. Boost Your Website’s Traffic

If you want your content to reach as many people as it can, you should make it approachable to your users. Do not make leave it up to your audience to manually copy and paste URL links in order to share your content – your busy readers will not have time for it. As a consequence, you will lose the opportunity to earn more followers and prospective clients, owing to the bad user experience. Make your web pages easily shareable, and it will increase referral traffic to your content.

2. Make It Social, Location, And Mobile Sharing Friendly

Social, location and mobile marketing (or SoLoMo) is the new hot topic in the marketing world. It refers to the integration of location-based, social, and mobile marketing mechanisms.

A vast majority of users search mostly through their phones, it is of great significance to optimizing your website for mobile devices, and enable phone users to access and share your content. Also, mobile-friendly sites have a much higher ranking in a search engine.

If your business is located on multiple locations, and you are using local landing pages, you should work to optimize social signals on your site, as they are the crucial factor that affects local search ranking. Boost the local buzz about your business just by adding share buttons to your local landing pages.

The last, but not the least, is the social aspect. Today’s consumers get most of their information about the product and service through comments and reviews, which is why it is important to present your “social proof” on your site. It can be as simple as putting social media buttons on your web pages or presenting your audience with reviews of your product.

If all this sounds a little too complicated and time-consuming, do not hesitate to invest in a social media management company, such as Eight Clients Social Media Management. Nowadays hiring someone to manage your social media accounts is almost inevitable.

3. Diversity Of Your Backlinks Matters

Do not overlook the importance of backlinks, basically the links that lead from others to your web site. Search engines are ranking pages also by the number and quality of backlinks a page has. If users get to your website through trusted and high-ranking websites such as Forbes, Tumblr or Lifehacker, SEO will adjust your website’s ranking accordingly. Therefore, it will boost your ranking.

The inevitable conclusion is that social media changed our perception of marketing and has become an integral part of our lives and businesses. We use it as a tool to communicate, share ideas and gather information. Stepping up the social media game is only a natural step for all business owners and content creators.