How Social Signals Help SEO

We highlight 3 Reasons why your need to Include Social Signals in Your SEO Strategy for June 2023.

Regarding search engine optimization (SEO), social signals are far off its spectrum. At least, that’s what we are led to believe.

Whatever happens in SEO doesn’t interfere with your social media efforts and vice versa.

The truth of the matter is that combining SEO and social media as part of a unified online marketing strategy will yield better results for your online business.

In particular, creating social signals could help improve your search rankings.

Social signals refer to a webpage’s collective shares, likes and overall social media visibility as perceived by search engines. These activities contribute to a page’s organic search ranking and are seen as another form of citation, similar to backlinks.

This post lists why you should develop a strategy for building your website’s social signals and how you can do it successfully.

Reasons Why You Must Ramp Up Your Social Media Presence

Understanding the impact these signals bring as a ranking factor enables you to properly incorporate social signals in your SEO efforts, leading to higher rankings on major search engines.

That said, below are the reasons social signals are critical to your SEO rankings:

#1 – Justifies Your Backlink Profile

Aside from high-quality content, a link profile composed of dofollow backlinks from authoritative sites is the best way to get your website ranking on top of Google search in no time.

Naturally, you want to launch a link-building campaign that focuses on getting these links from high DR/DA sites to maximise the results.

However, there’s a problem with this particular approach:

You need to compliment your link building efforts with social media.

If your site has a robust link profile and low social media engagement, Google will view this as a disconnect on your site.

How can a site with lots of good links not have good social activity?

The discrepancy between a site’s link profile and social media would lead Google to think it is engaging in link schemes. The search engine would then not rank your website on par with sites with equally good backlinks.

Whether you are engaging in link schemes or not doesn’t matter. What matters to Google and all search engines is this:

Your site won’t rank because it doesn’t look natural.

In this case, you should launch campaigns to build your social signals alongside your link building initiatives.

By sharing your content on social platforms and getting likes and comments from them, you get to justify the links you’re getting simultaneously.

This makes Google think that the backlinks your site is getting are because of the social activity and vice versa.

# 2 – Increases Click-Through Rate

Customer reviews are another type of social signal users generate about your business. Users enter their feedback about your products and services and give you a star rating to grade their overall experience with your brand.

They can fill this out on local business review sites like Yelp or on your Google  Business Profile (if you have one set up).

You should know by now that providing the best customer experience is your top priority. If customers like your product enough, they will spread the word to their family and friends, which could result in referral sales.

From here, their family and friends will refer your business to others, causing a chain of referrals that could help your business grow even further.

However, the opposite could happen as well. For example, if people had a terrible experience with your business, they’ll make sure people know about it by writing a review about it.

With enough people sharing their bad experiences with your company, it reflects poorly on search engine results pages (SERPs). Here’s an example:

The legitimacy of the rating is a different story altogether. But the fact that a brand has a low rating on an authoritative platform like Trustpilot raises many red flags. As a result, people who see this on SERPs would shy away from the brand and never trust them again.

So, it’s in your best interest to launch a campaign that will help improve your customer review rating by getting more 5.0 ratings from legitimate customers.

This way, you can leverage the featured snippets that will appear on review sites about your brand and convince users to click on your page.

# 3 – Send Behavioural Signals to Search Engines

All the shares, likes, and even clicks on SERPs as a result of social signals that your site receives compound your overall website performance.

And while social signals are a direct SEO ranking factor, the results they produce for getting people to interact with your site help Google align your site’s backlinks with audience engagement.

From here, it’s all a matter of how high Google will index your pages on SERPs for which keywords.

What Does It Take to Grow Your Social Signals?

Now that you know how social media helps SEO, below are ways that you can build social signals for your business to improve your search engine rankings:

Choose Your Major Social Media Platforms

Since not all of your audience will be on all social channels, you must determine the ones where they’re on.

To do this, you must have a well-defined buyer persona. For example, finding out your audience’s age group, interests, hobbies, pain points, and others gives you a clear idea of who to engage with on social media.

From here, you’ll be able to determine which platforms to join on social media relevant to your buyer persona.

Joining Facebook is almost a no-brainer since there’s a good chance your target audience has an account there. But platforms like TikTok and Instagram target more specific demographics that may or may not involve your target audience.

For instance, if your business caters to teenagers, you should include both channels in your strategy.

This way, you can maximise your efforts in talking to your audience and building a following.

Develop and Implement Social Calendar

A social calendar consists of engaging content you’ll be sharing on your chosen social channels to increase your social signals.

Consider sharing only your best content on these channels. Aside from your blog posts, posting engaging content from other websites and surveying followers allows you to provide even more value from your social media.

Ideally, you want to brainstorm for at least a month’s worth of social posts. Then, schedule these posts using your social media tool of choice. This way, you don’t have to log in to your social accounts daily just to publish them.

Also, observe the best times when to publish your posts on social media.

The time ultimately depends on who your followers are, but if you don’t have a large following yet, you can use what people say are the best times for sharing. Doing so allows you to get your posts when most social users are available, thus increasing their visibility.

Build Relationships with Influencers

To expedite your social growth, you must establish friendships with influencers in your niche. They have many followers and are considered authorities by the same audience you share with them.

By being friends with them, you can leverage your newfound relationships to grow your followers and get more engagements to your posts in the long run.

Finding influencers isn’t as simple as looking for social accounts with the most followers. Check how often they respond to and share content from others. You want to reach out to people that give you the best chance of getting replies.

Similar to your audience, you want to show your value to influencers to elicit a response. Sharing their content on your social media or asking them questions about their expertise are just a few examples.

If done successfully, influencers will return the favour by sharing your content on their channels and getting engagement from their audience.

Even better, some of their followers will follow you on social media to get more of the excellent content you’re producing.

Gather Social Proof

If you’re selling products and services, you want to get customers to leave their thoughts about them.

After fulfilling their orders, send them an email asking them to write a review about your business. Also, set up a follow-up email to customers who didn’t leave a review the first time.

Next, allow people to write a review on your product or service page. If they sincerely enjoyed their purchase from you, they’ll make it a point to leave a review even if you don’t ask them to.

Create a “Write a Review” button that opens a form they’ll fill out for their review. The page will then show their feedback so prospects can see how good your product is.

Getting positive customer reviews allows you to build positive sentiment for your brand, which search engine algorithms will use to determine your SEO rankings..

Jumpstart Your Social Signals with Signal Boy!

Doing all the above should help you generate more social signals to your website that will help compliment your link building strategy.

But achieving all this isn’t as easy as it seems, as there’s a lot you must do before you can even get your robust social strategy off the ground.

However, there are ways to help expedite getting social signals without spending hours or weeks doing it yourself.

With Signal Boy, we can help you drip-feed social signals to your posts in a matter of days! We get real people to share your website on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

This way, you can be sure that your link building efforts aren’t in vain, as the social signals will make your website’s rise to the ranks look as natural as possible. In addition, Google will then rank your website higher on search results for your keywords!

Check out our packages by clicking here.